Hello, I'm Chris Legaspi and I'm going to be the instructor for
this Photoshop lesson. In this lesson we're finally going to
get into the meat of Photoshop, the fun stuff, the drawing and
the shading. We're going to learn how to make our own comps
from scratch. Yes. I know finally, right? I'm going to
show you guys how to set up your brushes so you can draw, how to
set up your layers so you can add tones. And once we cover all
the various tools and techniques and tips I'm going
to give you guys an assignment so that you can try and use all
the tools you learn to make your own comps. So if you're
ready to get started, let's begin.

We're going to begin this lesson with a review. A lot of
the stuff we talked about can be a little complex, can be a
little intimidating. So I want to review as much as possible.
So we're going to briefly go over the major tools that we've
covered and that these tools we're going to expand on in this
lesson and then we're going to get into drawing. So we're actually
going to finally start drawing and then
add our own tones, values, and shading. And for for this
lesson, I'm going to go a little bit quickly. I expect
you guys to have kept up. If you haven't, please please
please review the previous lessons at any time and I'll
try to do my best as well to go slow, talk you through the
process, but a lot of the stuff here we've already covered.
Again just more review, more refinement, and just you know,
more expansion of your tool set. So let's get started.
All right, so let's do a quick review.
The first thing
we need to know of course is to
set up our canvas and we do that by
having a canvas, opening a file or making a new file. So this
example I'm making a new file and remember the file size
is really up to you. But I recommend 8 by 10 inches just
it's basically the size that you can print out on your
printer, eight-by-ten. Your printer will print it out. It's
just something that I like to do and 200 DPI. So this is a
new, file new. And remember you can also open. Command key for
opening, hot key is command O, command new. And you can also
open
an existing file. We have
a drawing or picture or even a blank canvas that you might
have already set up.
So here's just opening a previous drawing. So remember
you can open a file, create a new one.
The next major tool we're going to use in this lesson are the
selection tools. So remember we have marquees and they come in
very different shapes, squares, and circles. And we also have
lasso. Lasso has two different options or two main options that can
be used. Freeform lasso. You can draw random
shapes organic shapes and the polygon lasso we can draw more
precise geometric shapes.
So lasso going to be used quite a bit. Remember the short
key is L.
And of course since I'm going to be doing our drawing we're
going to be using our brush menu quite a bit. So let's take
a look at the brush menu now.
Now remember there's the two brush menus that I like to to brush menus that I like to
use or I like to keep open are brush, this all your brush
controls,
and brush presets. These are the
custom brushes that you make and you save and you can
organize them in various presets. It's kind of like
having your own can of brushes or your own container of
drawing pencils and tools.
And remember in the brush menu, we can change the shape of the
brush, adjust the spacing, and we have all these different
controls also on the left that we can fine-tune a brush and
we'll cover more of that but just keep in mind that these
two we'll be reviewing and using quite a bit in this lesson.
And also as for the windows, I like to group them together
along with color. So I like to put brush presets, brush ,and
color menu all in the same kind of menu group. Remember you can
group and tab as many as you want, but this is sort of the
layout that I like and the reason why
I like colors because I want to have this slider available, the
brightness. This will control how light or how dark my
my drawing lines are my ink lines will be and I could also
click on the little box to bring up a larger color picker
and for this lesson we'll be using mostly black and white.
So if you're using the color, the hue box here this color
picker box you can just slide the cursor up and down, the
far left side. So this is pure black and white.
So that's the
recommended menu setup.
And we also have the layers. Remember layers we can make
new layers by clicking this button. The shortcut is shift
command new.
Shift command new
create a new layer and we can change through order, you know,
we can put layer two at the bottom, layer one at the top, and
so on. We can totally change the order. We can
delete layers just by clicking the -
highlighting a layer and clicking the garbage can or we
can also click, hold, and drag.
And
we can also change the opacity of each layer. So for example,
I can -
I'm going to write using my brush here and write the word
100%.
And then you can change the opacity of
the layer. We'll use that quite a bit. And also you can duplicate
your layer
by dragging it to the new layer
button or
by the shortcut is command J. So now we have three different
copies of our layer.
So that's a quick overview of layers. The last thing that's
very important to keep your eye on is the options menu.
Remember options
is a bar, if you're using
one of the newer versions of Photoshop it's actually a bar,
little options bar at the top of your window there and you
could drag it off if you want. I like to keep it just tabbed
up there and the options that we're going to be looking for
up here to keep our eye on are opacity -
and remember opacity has a hotkey. So let's say this is
100%, we can do opacity. If we click five it'll change it to
50%. If we click one, the hotkey, go to 10% right? Barely visible.
And you can also change the
the opacity of your brush using the
slider there and also
one of the tools going to be using quite a bit is transfer
and transfer is
this button next to opacity there and transfer gives you
the option to
affect the opacity jitter.
Transfer gives you the option
to affect the opacity using your pen pressure.
Okay. The last thing we're going to review is zoom, pan, and
view mode. So zoom is a very important tool, especially when
we're doing thumbnails. So remember the shortcut for zoom
is
the letter Z or it's also the magnifying glass here on your
toolbar. And you click to zoom in
and you can hold alt to zoom out. Remember, you got to keep
holding alt to change the view mode. Now this may also be
reversed.
If you notice on your options bar, you notice that plus is
highlighted or zoom in. If I highlight minus or zoom out it'll
default to zoom out. So my picture will get smaller.
And then I hold alt to reverse. So it's up to you what you're so it's up to you what you're
more comfortable with. I like to have a default to zoom.
And what's cool about this and also pan
is that we can zoom in and we can pan.
And remember Z to zoom in and to pan is spacebar. And this is
useful because now if you want to get detailed - let's say
I want to work on this corner of the D. So I just pan it
and move it over to it's more comfortable space for me and
the shortcut is spacebar. Just press and hold space bar
and you'll be able to pan and now that I'm zoomed in, I can
add some detail here. You know, if I wanted to add a little
curly Q or something like that, little filigree. I don't know.
Right,
but all of this is much much more helpful when you can zoom
in.
That's pretty cool. And the final thing is the view mode.
Remember, there's three different view modes. We can
access them with the shortcut F. So this is windows view mode.
This is pretty nice because it has
window and we can have multiple windows open.
You can also have a full screen window mode. This is full
screen, but you still has Photoshop available.
And you also have your file menu here available. And hit F
one more time you get full full screen and this is
with no -
with no menu options at all. So it's all hidden.
And remember too we can also unhide our tools, hide and
unhide our tools with tab.
So that was a very very quick review. You can find all of the
more in-depth -
in-depth information on those tools in previous lessons. Okay,
so that was just a quick, very very quick review. I know I
went through it quickly. But again all of those tools we
covered in previous lessons. So please stop this video and
review at any time if you get lost or if I'm going a little
too fast. So now let's set up a canvas. So of course, we have
to set up a canvas. There's a couple of ways we can do that
and I'm going to show you ways that I set up a digital Photoshop
canvas for specifically for making comps and
thumbnails. Okay, so there's really two basic ways to make a
canvas.
You're either going to have a single image on one canvas, you know,
or you're going to have multiple. Sometimes it's called
a one sheet. You can have like, you know, for example you can
have -
you can have something like
this where you have,
you know, four different thumbnails on one sheet. That's
called the one sheet and we'll talk about that now but let's
say you just want - let's just say you just jump on your you just jump on your
Photoshop. You just want to do a quick black-and-white comp.
You want to start drawing, you're very excited about this, you
know, you went through the lesson you're super excited,
you're ready to get started. So
obviously
we know how to make a new canvas. Now the size I recommend,
I recommend keeping it - I like to do - what I like to do is keep
the DPI high, so 300 DPI and I'll talk about why that's
important in a minute. But I like to set the canvas size
pretty small. It's actually like almost like a sketchbook.
So for me, I'm going to treat drawing comps in Photoshop
exactly like I would draw it in my sketchbook, exactly the
same. I'm going to basically make a digital sketchbook
canvas. So that's what I wanted to show you here and you
know
to make a digital canvas just make it pretty much the same
size as a piece of paper. So what's a good thumbnail size?
Five by seven for large paintings. If you do it, maybe
you want to do just like a smaller painting but you want
to do a small thumbnail of course or a small illustration
I would say, you know, two to three inches. Let's just do -
let's just do two by four inches.
And
this is horizontal. Remember you can rotate your
canvas. Make sure you have a hotkey set up for that. We
covered that in previous lessons.
So this is a 2 inch by 4 inch. Obviously, it's way too
vertical.
Remember you can change your canvas at any time by going to
image, canvas size. And now we can make it 3 by 4.
And the background color was a little - was black because the
setting -
let's try that again. Because the setting under here,
canvas extension color was black. So I can set it to
foreground, background, whatever I have. In this case I'll just
set it to white.
And we'll make it three by four. Make sure you keep your anchor in
the middle and now it's nice and expanded. So this is a this
is a three inch by four inch 300 DPI digital canvas. And the reason
why the DPI is important
is because of resolution.
I'll show you two examples. So this one is
300
DPI
Like my bubble letters?
Like my old school bubble letters?
Let me fill it in for you real quick so you can see
why
DPI is important.
I know it's pretty exciting, huh?
This is 300 DPI. Now, let me make the same one but let's say
let's make it at 72 DPI, which is
the resolution of computer screens. So this is 72 DPI and
notice this one have much more to work with. Now watch what
happens when I try to draw on a three - even though this is three
inch by four inch, when I try to draw it will look a little
strange. Watch.
See that? I don't know if you can see it, but let me fill it
in so you could be a little bit more clear.
Blow it up some more. Now when I blow it up you can see the
difference, right? You see pixelation. Now, that's really
not that big a deal. Of course we're making - we're just making a
comp, a thumbnail, a sketch basically, it's not that big of
a deal but I say might as well
get some more pixels, get some more pixel resolution, some more
depth. You have much more pixels to work with. Sort of like
photography, you know, this is like shooting - or let's say
you're shooting a piece of artwork or you're shooting a
portrait you know, why go low res when you have the
capability - digital capability? Might as well give
yourself some pixels. So actually I'm going to - this is
72 DPI. That's incorrect.
Right, so you see the pixelation and you don't
want that in my opinion.
So that's why if you're working on a small canvas, something
like six inches, I would set the DPI pretty high to around 300.
So that's using a single canvas to make a thumbnail.
The next thing we can do is we can create a one sheet or put
multiple thumbnails on a canvas. So this one should work
perfectly because this is -
this is eight by ten. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to
bump the resolution up from this one.
So this is eight by ten inch at 300 DPI. So it's pretty high. And
the reason why I want high DPI is for print.
So this won't be for web. This will be something that - well
of course I can export it to website but something I can
print out and, you know, set alongside my canvas.

Now one of the more simplest ways to
make your thumbnails is set up a little frame. So
there's a bunch of ways to do that. A bunch of ways.
One way is
it's to just draw them and we'll talk about brushes. So
you could take like this is the default brushes in Photoshop.
Let me just take one of the plain old ones, the hard edge
ones that are defaulted.
Make sure it has a transfer turned off.
Make sure it has a transfer turned off. So nice hard edge
brush, hundred percent opacity.
And then, you know, just take this color, this pure black.
So I can just draw a frame and one tip is that if you hold
shift, right now I'm holding shift, and then if I lay my pen
down I could draw a perfectly vertical or horizontal line
just by holding shift.
And I'll talk about what just happened there in a minute. So you see I'm
holding shift, and I just I basically create a hand-drawn
looking frame. And you can - remember you can also call up
eraser.
You know clean up your edge. That's one way to do it.
That's drawing your frame by hand.
Another way is to use the line tool. The line tool is under
your
shape tool and the shortcut is U and it's these series of
shapes right above your pan, right above your zoom near the
bottom of your toolbar and remember if you click and hold
you'll see all the various options. You can do rectangles,
rounded rectangles, ellipses, and other things. Well, let's go to
line tool. And line tool is pretty cool because it makes a
perfectly clean straight line obviously.
And
there's a bunch of different options here in your options
bar.
The one to keep in mind is the color and that's fill. So let's
just keep it nice and black. Stroke draws a line around your
stroke. We don't want that. This is the style. You can do
dashed or straight. We just want straight. It's a pretty
cool new feature. That's fairly new.
And finally weight. Weight is how thick. So let's just shoot for -
let's just make it nice and thick. Let's do an eight pixels.
See what that looks like. That was actually not that big. So this
is an eight pixel line.
I don't like that. I'm sure you guys can't see that that well.
So
let's change it to 16. I always make it twenty, twenty pixels.
And the reason why it looks so small - there you go. It's a
little better. Reason why it looks so small is that because
this is a pretty high res image at 300 DPI eight-by-ten inch.
So that was one
line that I drew. Now when you're using the line tool,
it's actually shape. It's a vector-base. So if you
want to do multiple lines on one sheet, on one layer,. Right
now it's a shape, notice how it looks on the layer. You
can go to this little button on your options bar, then click
combine shapes and what that will do is now you can add a
new line on the same layer. So check this out. Remember hold
shift, you can make your line tool perfectly vertical or
horizontal. There you go.
And I'm just going to repeat that
and to use line tool just got to click, hold, and drag. Notice I'm
dragging it. Then whenever you stop, boom, line tool stops as
well. And do one more at the side. Click, hold, and drag.
So I got a pretty clean looking frame there, you know, I can
clean up these edges and to do that all you got to do with
line tool
is
either change the shape
by moving these pixels or
you can do what we did here is delete them and one way to
erase is to take your line layer and then do what's called
raster. Basically taking it from an object, because these -
what these crates are objects, they create what's called vector
objects, they're basically graphic design tools and they
have unlimited - they're able to scale their pixels. But
when we combine them with a layer we do what's called rasterizing.
It's not that important that you remember that but remember
that vectors are really powerful because they have the
ability to scale.
And then you can just erase these little parts. Here
I'm using a marquee, just drawing a nice box and then
using the backspace to delete what's in the marquee.
That was pretty cool. And I know I went over that a little
bit quick. But definitely take your time in reviewing.
So this is a drawn. This is line tool.
And the last way, which is a fairly
simple way is is again either to make a box make a box using
a marquee or to use an object, a shape again. So let's try
marquee first. So what I like to do is take the marquee, draw the
box,
right just draw - let's draw a nice little box. And then I'm
going to make a new layer first and what I want to do is I'm
going to fill it with the color, in this case it's going to
fill it with pure black, doesn't really matter because what we
want to do
is turn the fill down. We'll talk about fill in a minute. So
I'm going to turn my fill down. So now what happens out. So now it's what happens
is what's filled inside the box is at 0% opacity. It's
basically you can't see it because it's transparent. Then
I'm going to go down here under effects -
remember, these are layer effects. I want to go to
stroke.
And then stroke is a pretty cool tool because what this
does is it gives you the ability, you see under size I can just
move the slider and you can see how it changes the size of your
stroke. This is really cool. This is why I like this style
the best of all three that I showed you here and
the things to keep in mind when you're doing your stroke are of
course the size. This is how thick it is in pixels. So I'm
just going to leave it at 24, just a nice number there. And then
color.
In this case you can make it whatever color you want. But
in this case we're just using pure black.
And finally position the one to keep in mind position - of
course blend mode. You want to keep it a normal. You can change
it to different layer blend modes and they can be a little
confusing so just keep it a normal. And then position, it
can be inside, outside, or center and the main difference between -
I never use, I rarely use center, I use either inside or outside a use either inside or outside
and the main difference with with those two is that inside
like we have here, notice
I'm zooming in here - notice how sharp the outer edges is, just a
sharp as the edge of the marquee of the mask that we
drew.
But if we go outside, look what happens, draws a nice curve
because what it does is interpret interpret
interpolates these two edges, the vertical and the horizontal,
and it creates a curve to bridge the gap. So if you want
a little bit of a curve on your thumbnail frame, go with outside.
Me, I like inside, I want crisp and sharp. So that's three
different ways to make a thumbnail frame. And
let me show you stroke real quick. Excuse me, fill.
And fill is cool because right now it's a zero. Let's bring it
back to 100. What fill does is it hides what is in
the shape of the object that you drew or painted but it
maintains the effects. So in other words if you're doing - if
you're making a frame the fill will hide the shape but
maintain
this nice beautiful stroke or the frame that we just created.
And to effect that, that would be opacity. Now opacity effects
everything, see how we lower the opacity. It
affects the entire opacity of the entire layer. So fill just
affects what's inside of each object of each item or box that
you filled in.
I know it's a little confusing. But just remember
in this lesson
probably the only time you're going to use fill is
when you're making thumbnail boxes pretty much or making any
type of hard edge rectangular box or you can of course do
other shapes as well.
So that was fill.
And I like my box here. And the last thing
I want to show you is
well before we move on, I want to show you the
other way besides using marquee this was done.
Remember we drew marquee and we filled it in right, we use
stroke to make a stroke and fill to hide what's underneath
or what's in the center. The other way
is using the
rectangle tool again,
the shortcut is U and it's basically your shape and object
tool, your vector shapes. So I like to draw a nice rectangle
using my rectangle shape and just like
the marquee box we can add, we can
lower the fill so that what's inside is hidden and here you
can see the nice ghost of the shape. But this one actually
has
a nice -
the stroke is built-in to the options of the shape. That's
what that's what this button is next to fill. I mean you can
still do it with layer effects. You can
actually have two strokes now. This is a fairly new feature,
but this one is here
and you can you know change the thickness you can type it in.
Let's just do 24, exactly the same as the one before. You can
change the style. Let's just keep it nice and thick and
black.
So that was a shape. Now the advantage of a shape is that
because it's a vector, remember difference between vector and
rasterize is vector it has this unlimited ability to scale.
So notice I can just scale it and the pixels stay nice and
sharp and I could
keep it - I can shrink it also too. Notice if I scale this one I
will lose -
I will lose a little bit. Have to scale it quite a bit, but it's
just it's not as strong.
So if you're doing larger
thumbnails and if you want to eventually print, let's say you
want to - you're doing these for a client and you want to print
them out to like a big poster size maybe, I would definitely
use vector. This is a vector
frame.
It's basically an object. This is
a box frame. So it's really up to you. And remember too
you can always fine tune the size of your frame. So for
example, if you have this one, you go it's too vertical.
You know, you can do command T and transform the size of it.
You may lose some of the quality depending on the
size and the output but for this size you really don't lose
much and for the vector, it's no big deal at all. You can
definitely change its size no problem. And that one it'll
stay razor sharp no matter what.

And finally the last thing I want to show you is if for some
reason you wanted to make a precise
box,
you can go to a marquee. Remember the shortcut is M and you going to shortcut as M and you
can go to fixed size and you actually input the size here.
So let's say you want a perfect let's say 800 pixels
by 1200 pixels.
And boom it'll draw the box. You just have to click and then
it'll draw the perfect box.
And this one I filled in on the layer that has a zero fill with
a stroke. So it became a new object and it automatically added its
own stroke.
And here you can also copy. Let's say I like this stroke, I can
just drag it from this layer, hold alt, click, hold, and drag,
and then boom it will copy the stroke. It will copy the effect
that I chose and then make sure you drop the fill. Boom. We
have another transparent frame.
And this one we used the exact ratio. You can also switch it
from pixels to inches. You can do that in the preferences as
well.
But that's - we don't really need to get into that
today.
Now the last thing we want to do is actually set up our
nice little one sheet. Let's say I'm going to make four
thumbnails on one sheet. So - oops, still have fixed size.
Going to bring it back to normal. I'm just going to make
a box, just to make it quick, just draw a rectangle with my
marquee.
I'm going to fill it with black,
drop my fill, then add a stroke. I'm going to make my stroke
inside 24 pixels.
And then
make sure it's nice and black. It looks pretty good.
I know this is a little too tall for this sheet. Of course
I can change the canvas size at any time. Okay now that I have
my box
and I have it at a pretty good size. You know, I scaled it.
What I can do now is I want multiple boxes and there's a
couple ways to do that. One is we can duplicate the layer,
which we already know how to do. The shortcut is command J.
Duplicate the layer now. We have two, one, two, but they're
stacked on each other so we can just move it to the side, whoop.
And remember the move key is V.
And if you hold shift you can move it perfectly vertical left,
up or down or horizontal.
And the newer versions of Photoshop had these guides,
which is pretty cool. You might see it on your screen as little
pink guides to help me lock it in place.
And the last way - I'm going to name it. I'm gonna name it
frame one. Gonna name this frame two. The last thing we could do.
The second way we can duplicate is to literally drag it. So
what I do is I like to hold - activate the move tool which is
V, hold shift alt and what this will do is it will
duplicate and drag. So watch this. I'm holding shift and ALT
with the move key active. Right here. And then
boom, you see what happened? Made a copy and because I held shift
I was able to drag it perfectly straight down. So gonna call this
frame 3.
And then what I'm going to do now
is I'm going to take frame two and do the same thing. Hold shift
and ALT with the move tool active, okay just add a
little arrow, then whoop, drag it and then use the guides to lock
it into place. So these are four perfectly spaced squares.
And you can keep them separate but I'm just going to -
I name them just so that you can see it watching this video,
but pretty much I just make four and then merge the groups
and remember you can hold shift and click to merge or you can
hold shift at the top and then shift at the bottom. It's just like
working with the Windows folder or Mac folder when you're
selecting files, and then the command E is merge down or
merge selected. And then boom,
merge into one frame.
And then
you can move this layer around, fine-tune it. You can even crop
really tight if you want. Let's do that now, so I'm just going
to crop, just draw a marquee around my canvas then we do
control, command C. And boom, crops it to my marquee and you could
of course you can always add to your canvas at any time
and this is my frames and then what we could do is make a
new layer and then boom, start drawing right underneath the
frame. Make sure that our bottom layer is active.
Call it drawing one, just to name it, just so I know what I'm
doing.
I'm call it you know, I'll just draw
a little thumbnail of - that's me with my big old ears.
There you go.
That's his pointing finger. Number one,
right? And it's right underneath my frame. It's nice and it's nice
and
locked in a frame. And we'll talk next about how we can keep
the edge really tight. But this is
one way I like to draw eyes with just basically make
a series of frames that - you don't have to make four of
course. You can make a whole bunch,
as many as you need.
I'll call this one - let's draw a -
let's give him a friend here.
And she's holding up a peace sign, number two.
Just a nice little basic drawing.
You can name it.
Now you can change the order of course. That's one way
to make frames using just a nice hand drawn box, just like
you do on paper. I would do the same thing on paper. I would
take an ink pen and go whoop, with a rule and go
whooping, the t-square. Whoop, do the exact same thing. But in
Photoshop we can do it in five seconds, and we have layers and
other editing tools to help make us more efficient. Okay,
so that was just a quick way to make frames. The second one is
a little bit cleaner. Is the one that I use more often,
we're going to use a combination of what we learned
here and we're also going to use the alpha mask.
So alpha mask is one of my favorite things in the world,
also known as the layer mask.
So let's say I want to make
six
frames, let's say I want to do -
let's say I want to draw a bunch of movie posters or
advertisements.
Or vertical paintings or drawings or designs. Let's
close this guy, we don't need that.
And I just turned my canvas horizontal and I did that with
the shortcut. And remember you want your flip canvas shortcuts
and the image rotations, they're all here under image,
image rotation and notice I have mine all set to shortcuts.
And if you haven't already make sure to do that, of course for
thumbnailing you need it and this can be found in the
previous lesson that you can review how to make your
shortcuts.
So I have a
horizontal. Let's say I want to make 6. I want to make them
perfectly evenly spaced. So what I'm going to do is I'm
going to use a vector because vector is really tight, really
tight, and I can scale and resize and I won't lose that
much.
So I'm going to take a - just a rectangle shape. What I'm gonna
do is I'm going to draw
a nice little box, nice little black box.
Then I'm going to duplicate this black box.
Oh and I use the same exact technique, shift and alt to drag,
activate move tool.
In this case you have to activate your selection tool.
This is a different way to select and this is selecting
objects. And the shortcut is A, it's called passe selection.
Notice it's right above your vector objects.
So if you have used A to select your vector object, in this
case my box, hold shift and alt and then boom.
And you can drag it vertically or horizontally.
And I'm just eyeballing the space you can make it more
precise, but for thumbnails, I really really don't see the
need.
Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to duplicate these three
other boxes.
And just drag them down.
Make sure there's a nice vertical space between them.
And here I'm using my arrow keys to fine-tune. Now I have a
problem.
My boxes are not the right size for this canvas so I can either
increase the canvas or I can just change the size of my box.
So I'm going to do that. So I get all my boxes on one layer.
So I'm just do a command T. Boom. And it selects all of
them and then I'm just going to slightly shrink it in and I
can even slightly expand it out so that it fills out
my eight by ten canvas a little better.
Okay, so now I have six different boxes
that I do and you don't have to use the objects, you can
definitely do this with the marquee box. So what I'm going
to do now is I'm going to make a mask and then I'm going to
use the mask as a literally a mask so that I can start
to draw underneath and have a nice clean and tight frame. So
to do that, once you have your boxes, basically I'm laying out
the boxes that I'm going to be drawing in, the little - my
little frames. Once I have the the layout I want I'm going to
go through the layer with my boxes, and I'm going to hold
command
and click and what that does is it'll draw a selection. Notice
now there's marching ants, an active selection around my box.
So what I'm going to do,
first I'm going to make a fresh layer and I'm going to fill it
with black. So fill it with black.
Okay. Now I'm going to make my rectangle visible just
to make it active. Then I'm going to hold command and click,
boom and draw these the selections, the marquees,
or actually draw the selection and make it active.
Then I'm going to go to my - the layer I just filled in and I'm Lair. I just filled in and I'm
going to call this
a mask or frames.
And then when the selection is active
going to click my alpha channel button, boom, and what that does
is it draws an alpha channel based on the selections that
are created. But of course this one's inverted, see if I make a
new layer underneath and I try to draw it only draw in the
gaps, which I don't want. So what I want to do is select the
mask and invert it and the shortcut is command I. Boom.
So now I have my mask, a
series of frames,
and then I can draw underneath just like we did before,
right?
But this time we have a tight
frame.
Remember before we could see the drawing, go outside of the
boundaries. Now, we have it inside the boundaries.
So we don't have to worry about this stuff. And we can even
expand.
Let's say you want more negative space. So we can either
shrink our frames or just expand the canvas. In this case
because I need some more space on this side it's a little crazy.
So I'm just going to bring up the crop tool. It's another
quick way to expand and what I'm gonna do is go to the corner would do is go to the corner
and hold shift and what that'll do is do a uniform scale
to a perfect ratio. Perfect aspect ratio.
And just expand my canvas.
Then what I'm going to do is
move - I want to keep my drawings where they were now just going
to -
what I have to do now is all I have to do is expand my
mask to go - fill this white space to cover the white space.
And to do that I can either
make a new layer, fill it and duplicate the mask, or I can
just take the one I have and one of these I'm going to
delete it. So going to select all, that layer. Delete it then
I'm going to fill it back again with black. This time it'll
fill the entire layer, entire canvas and there it is. Then
I'm going to make sure to link my mask. So now I have
nice, beautiful
mask to cover my thumbnail. So this is typically how I work if
I was doing thumbnails for professional illustration work.
And finally, don't forget if you want to check your
thumbnails you got to have flip canvas hotkey.
Mine is set to F2, you can change it to whatever you feel. Definitely
you need flip canvas hockey and it'll come into play
throughout your entire career, of course, but definitely when
you're working in digital, it's very very useful. Okay. Now we
have a canvas ready. I showed you a couple ways to set up a canvas
and to set up a one sheet or a page full of different - full of
frames that you can make quick little thumbnails that you can
use
to print, to display, or of course to blow them up and to
make them more refined artworks.

Now let's talk about brushes because we're going to get into
drawing. We're going to draw this lesson I promise. We're
going to start making art I promise. The first thing we
need to do is we need to have our brushes locked and loaded.
So now we're going to
cover exactly the type of brushes that I use and I think
that are most useful for drawing and sketching and
shading in Photoshop.
Let's talk about brushes. So I'm going to make a
new canvas.
My good old default size. We can change it anytime.
Okay, there's really four types of brushes that we need. We need a
hard edge brush that we can use for masking and
for doing tight details, really sharp sharp edges, sharp details
and masking. We need some type of
brush to sketch with. It's basically a brush that
simulates a pencil.
And we need a soft airbrush. This is perfect for like
blending and doing subtle details and things like that.
Soft airbrush.
And the last brush we need is texture,
something that can quickly simulate various textures that
we may want in our comps.
This happens to be a leaf texture brush. This workflow is
going to mimic traditional and that's really my goal. When I
sit on Photoshop, I think of it as a piece of paper
or canvas. That's exactly what I'm doing here. These three
brushes that I need are - these are what I have
on my desk. I have ink pens, hard edge. I have It's hard Edge. I have
pencils, all different kinds of pencils for drawing, sketching.
I have soft airbrush so these would be like this is basically
techniques, I can use blend blending techniques, stumps, my
finger to soften edges and texture there's multiple ways to
use texture or in traditional we use paper. So everything I'm
doing here exactly like I do
on pencil paper on canvas and I'm pretty much sure it will
mimic the way that you work and you can also as you get
experience, you'll be able to fine-tune Photoshop to mimic
exactly the way you work in traditional.
Okay, so let's first set up a hard edge brush.
And right now what I have loaded is default Photoshop
brushes, so I'm going to clean this up a little bit. So this
is the brush pack that comes with Photoshop. And
remember
these thumbnails can be adjusted here. The drop-down
menu. I like small thumbnail. You can also do stroke, which
shows you what the stroke looks like. So I like small
thumbnail.
Let's go to brush and now we can kind of see it and
fine-tune it, control it.
So right now I want an ink brush. So what I'm going to do
is make sure to turn my spacing all the way down, zero transfer.
And make sure my opacity is all the way up.
And for shape dynamics, make sure I have pen pressure
control set to minimum diameter.
And this is what the brush looks like.
Gives me that nice thick and thin.
It's pretty cool. And of course, it's very useful
because it's hard edge you can make really tight and
sharp masks. And you know, I really love to use mask. We're
going to be doing quite a bit of that later when we add
tones. This is my ink brush.
So I like this ink brush. I like the size. Of course, we
can change the size too. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to save
it. So I'm going to go to
the drop down menu at the upper right and go new brush preset.
I'll call it ink one. Just name it whatever you want. And there
it is at the bottom.
We could also make a really thicker one that doesn't have
the thick or thin. So let's turn off shape dynamics. And
now this is generic old hard round. Let's make it a little bit
bigger. That way you can fill in large shapes with
this one.
I'm going to save this as well.
Call it new brush preset. I'll call it ink, fill one.
Just a nice big blocky brush
for bigger areas and bigger strokes.
Now next is a drawing brush and there's a couple ways to do
that, a bunch of ways but
a lot of times what I'll do is I'll take my ink brush. My
basically my hard edge brush and I'll just add transfer and
transfer is right here.
And remember we transfer, if you go to pen pressure control, you
can change the opacity jitter, right, notice the pen gets less
opaque as it gets to the tip. What that means is that as you
press down you get more pigment, more pixels, more ink, more paint
or whatever and as you lighten right notice, it gets lighter,
lighter, lighter.
Right? That's
what transfer does. And often what I'll do with what often what I'll do with
transfer, I'll combine transfer with opacities. Right now it's at one
hundred percent. Let's say if I just want to do a light quick
pencil sketch maybe I'll drop the opacity to 60%. So just
click six to quickly drop it and now I have a lot of
control and it's nice and light and subtle. So typically that's
what I'll do. If I just want to quickly start drawing I'll
take my ink brush with shape dynamics and transfer. So I like
this this brush so I'm gonna go brush preset and I'll call it
sketch one, just name it sketch whatever.
And there it is right there.
Another thing we could do, we can take the exact same brush
if we want a little bit of texture of course, we can add
texture using spacing and scattering. So first I'm going
to give it a little bit of space, like that.
Then I'm going to go to scatter
and then move the scatter a little bit, like that. And maybe
increase the count a little bit. It's okay like that.
Let's see both axes. Yeah, that looks good. What I want is some
sort of randomy kind of feeling, you see this kind of
random bumpiness to it. Let's see what that looks like. So,
now there's a little bit of texture. Now, this is round it's
a round brush so it looks kind of weird.
Typically, what I'll do is I'll make like a square brush.
Remember we can make a brush by using an image defining a brush
preset.
Let me see if there's one in the stack. There isn't one in the
stack. There's a texture brush, but this will also help
too.
It's like a blocky texture brush.
So we can go to tip shape, increase the spacing. You can
play with this,
play with the parameters even more.
Let's just make it a vertical here. What I'm going to do is go to
scattering
and also change the count, just so
has a little bit of texture.
And then when we go to draw with it, this will have even
more texture. Yeah see so this is like - and of course we can
tweak the angle, the angle's a little weird right now, but
this is a way to get
a drawing brush that looks a little bit texture-y. So if you
want to simulate drawing on paper, which you totally can
do,
now you have a nice texture brush you can use.
And the last way to make a drawing brush is to just
take a custom brush and and shrink it actually, just
make it smaller.
So these texture brushes are built into Photoshop here. I
just kind of open them. There was one that looks really there was one that looks really
good for drawing actually, Where did it go? I grabbed it
on accident. But let's just pick one. Yeah, grab this one
right here,
you know nice texture brush. So what I can do to make
it a drawing brush is to go, first go to shape dynamics.
Go to pen pressure, of course turn the minimum diameter. This time
I'm going to make the minimum diameter not completely zero,
maybe go to like 20%, something like that, 15%. Has a little bit
of thickness.
I'm going to turn on transfer.
Go to pen pressure. Then I'm going to turn on spacing, give
it a little bit of space and some -
little bit of space so it's more toothy.
That's a little too much space. You see how it looks like -
there you go. That was pretty good, still too much spacing.
There you go. Look at that. So I just took a
brush, custom texture brush that was built into Photoshop in
this case and play with the different parameters until you
get it right. And that's pretty much all you have to do is once
you pick a brush or you make a brush, you define a brush, then
you just play with the parameters until it really
gets the look and feel that you want. And I like this
brush. I'm going to save it, call it a new brush preset.
I'll call it a sketch two.
And there it is in my stack. Remember I have remember what I have?
regular plane sketch
and textural sketch. Pretty cool. And let me make a texture brush
and an airbrush. Now then I'm going to define a preset. Well
first I'll make an airbrush. I'll just grab one. That's oh yeah,
so it's pretty air brushy, the default brush has this nice
airbrush and they're pretty easy to make. All you do is
really take a hard round brush and whoop, drop the hardness,
drop the hardness to 0. I usually always add transfer to
make it very very subtle. This is what it looks like.
That's a hundred percent with pure black. So imagine, you
know, if you drop the opacity to 50, you can be more subtle,
20 be more subtle or you can of course you can change the
color. Now I don't have to paint pure black. You can paint like
a nice mid-tone grey to make it subtle. So I like this brush, a
nice big airbrush. 250 is a good size. I'm going to save it
as a preset, new brush preset.
Call it
airbrush one.
Then finally going to make a couple texture brushes.
Let's see. Let's take -
I'm not going to make one, I'm just going to use the ones that
are here.
This one has that
tilt feature.
I don't really like that.
Yeah, I'm not really happy with these. I might end up making my
own.
Well, let me use this one.
Let's see what the parameters are. So this is the brush what
we need is some spacing.
Now has a little bit of space to it.
What I want to is add -
add a shape dynamics and I want to do angle jitter, control off
and just going to rotate it, that kind of spins on itself
to make it more random. Then final thing's going to add
scatter,
increase the count a little bit. Remember scatter helps us to
make it textural. Yes a nice and textural, we can decrease the
amount of scatter. So you have a little bit more control.
Let's turn to count up. Okay good.
I just want to - the brush is pretty big right now. I need to
zoom out to see it.
Well, it's pretty - it's pretty good. I'm going to keep playing
with it. I'm not quite happy with it. So we're just going to
keep playing with it until it kind of looks and feels right. So
the spacing was good.
change the amount of scatter. That feels pretty good. Let's
lower it and see what happens.
That actually feels better. I like the lower scatter, increase the
count. See what happens. Okay lower count.
Back to where it was.
Might be a little bit too much spacing. I think that's the
problem.
Getting there, getting there.
I'm just trying to get the perfect look right now.
That looks pretty good. Looks pretty good. Let me turn off
spacing a little bit, lower the spacing,
and lower the scatter a little bit.
Well, bring the scatter back.
Okay, that feels pretty good.
Okay, that feels pretty good.
So I like this brush. I'm going to save it. New brush preset.
Going to call it texture one.
And let's see what other default texture.
I really need to make my own because these brushes are so
ugly.
Let's see.
Let's try this one.
Let's try this one. This one is this exact same brush that I
use for drawing. Let's see if we can turn it into a texture
brush.
Increase the spacing, increase the scattering, increase the count
quite a bit. Let's take the tip shape, add angle jitter.
See what that looks like. Yeah that looks terrible. I'm not nice looks terrible. I'm not
crazy about that brush . What I'm going to do is I'm going to make one.
So let's just do a quick review of how to make a brush. So
let's do 500 pixels. We need a perfectly square image, make a
new canvas. 300 DPI is good.
And I'm going to fill this with a bunch of -
let's fill with a bunch of squares.
Just gonna take my marquee,
make a - oops.
Fill it with a bunch of boxes.
I wasn't using pure black. So pure black and white. Then I'm gonna
do select all and edit, define brush preset. Boom. Call it
sample brush one, that's fine.
So now aha, now I go back.
Got my nice texture brush.
And this time this brush I can work with. So increase the
spacing. Yeah can even make it - I'll have to make it perfect
geometric.
We can play with the angle jitter. Now it'll go go kind of
crazy. Yeah. I like that. Let's make the scattering little bit
more, count a little bit more.
Let's shrink it. Let's see what it looks like.
Yeah, that's really cool. It creates is of course this very
geometric and stylized looking texture, but it should work for
now.
Should work for now and I'm going to save it.
Well, let's see if this -
because I may not want
too much angle jitter.
I'm trying to debate whether I want angle jitter or not.
It looks pretty good actually.
Keep playing with the settings until it looks right.
Okay, let me give myself a little bit of angle jitter. You
see how the - okay. That's perfect. I think that looks
pretty good.
That looks pretty good and nice and kind of texture-y and
toothy. Okay, so I like this brush for now.
New brush preset, boom. Call it texture dash square. I don't know,
you can name it whatever you want. Now it's in my stack. So
this 488 is the first one, the plain one. So I'm going to delete
that. All the information is in this box. I can bring it back
to its original form. So I'm just going to cut this one by
holding alt.
So now I have pretty much the three brushes that I need or
the four.
And now what I'm going to do is clean up this set. So go to
preset manager.
Then I'm going to select all these ugly default brushes that
I hate.
And hit delete, boom.
Hit done. Boom. This is only the brushes that I created today.
Beautiful beautiful beautiful.
And I'm going to save this as a preset so that I can
have access to it.
And it's going to save it as a dot ABR file, which is
Photoshop brush file. Okay, we covered a lot of stuff. Now the
brushes are our little bit complex, especially if it's the
first time you've seen this replayed with them. So I wanted
to take my time to cover
and review all about the brushes, how to get started. So now is how to get started. So now
let's actually use them. So this is the fun part.

Thanks for making it through, you know, kind of the
foundational part. So now we're going to actually draw and tone
and begin to use the brushes.
Okay, let me make a new file.
Okay. So in this section what I want to cover is how to
make marks and adjust your marks on the fly.
And to actually use the various tools to begin to render. Okay,
one of the first things that we want to know - well first let's
talk about brush size. And brush size
real quick the hotkey is the brackets.
Okay, the next thing is using opacity and opacity is up here
in your options.
And what I mean by opacity is how opaque your brush mark is.
So remember if we go to our brush settings, if we don't have
transfer right
our brush is fully opaque throughout the stroke, right?
It looks kind of like that and here we have the thick or thin
going and right now I'm using pure black. So one of the ways
to get subtlety and variety in your marks is with opacity. For
example, if you drop the opacity, you can get a more
subtle mark. So I'm going to hit five which is the numeric
hotkey for 50% opacity. You see that? And watch the mark. So
right, it's black, same color, a hundred percent, same brush, a
hundred percent opacity of the layer but it's made less opaque
because the brush, the opacity of the brush. If I drop it down
even more I'm going to hit two, the number two, which is hotkey
for 20, of course. Look at that. Even lighter. One, even lighter.
Let's go back to a higher number. Let's say I go back to
eight, 80 percent opacity.
So you see how we can get really nice results using
opacity. I use it quite a bit. So for example, let's say
you want to sketch something, right? Let's say you
want to sketch a face.
And you want to do your construction lines and things.
You don't want to do them with a hundred percent opacity. Night
now I'm at 40.
So lines are nice and thick - or excuse me, nice and thin, then it
simulates
traditional drawing, the traditional drawing. To get
finer lines you just lift up your pencil, in other words less
opaque stuff.
So again, you see the recurring theme here. My philosophy is to
match traditional and I know a lot of you watching are
traditional artists like me so,
you know, this is I think the most fun way to use
Photoshop. So whatever I do I try to bring it back to
old-school, traditional methods and try to mimic it as best as
possible and opacity is one of the tools I do that with.
Right and
then when I'm ready, let's say -
let's say I want to do like an ink drawing style like a comic
style, more illustrative style.
Let's say I want to
start adding
ink lines. What I could do is turn the opacity back up to
100% and then
right now
able to kind of go over my drawings exactly like
working with - this simulates a pen and ink
type of sketching.
And if I want - let's say
I want to get more subtle around the eyes, I could drop
the opacity
a little bit let's say to 80. Line's not as intense,
still dark and much clearer.
And let's say I wanted to add like a subtle detail here, but don't
want to make it too dark. I can drop the opacity to let's say
like 20% and just go over the line.
You know, you can even start shading with hatching using a
20% opaque pure black, 20% opaque, and look at the hatching
you're able to get so extremely extremely versatile working
method and I use it quite a bit. I can fill in the shadow.
Go darker if I want. So quite versatile when you when you
start to get comfortable with opacity.
Another way to use opacity to your advantage actually with
the layer opacity.
So let's say I got this
drawing here.
And let's say I like the drawing but the lines I made are a
little too thick. So what I could do is actually lower the
opacity of the layer. So watch this, there's my thick, drawing
full opaque. Can drop the opacity as much as I want, make
it very subtle,
less subtle, about halfway right there. So I like that let's keep
it half way. Then I can make a new layer, either put it above
or below. Just call this sketch.
Either above or below and now I can start
doing subtle shading. Maybe I'll drop the opacity of my
brush to like 40 percent. So now I can do subtle
fixes, refinements, subtle detail using hatch with my
little drawing brush.
Right? So a lot of stuff we can do.
Right? Can even start to add a little bit of shading on these
lips.
Let's say I want to add
some freckles,
you know, just trying to come up with anything. I can,
you know, I can start to add my half tone lines. I can work on
the core shadow here, some of the anatomy detail.
Some more wrinkles and things. So there's a lot we can do
with opacity. I can even take this layer - let's say oh
this layer is too
strong, I could drop its opacity. So lots of different
options, especially if you work with multiple layers, which I
think is a great practice. So I'm going to drop this a little
bit, then I'm going to merge the two.
And another way to get opacity
is with the transfer tool. So remember that transfer is an
option in your brush controls and what it does is gives you
the option to do
opacity jitter. Opacity jitter. And notice our stroke and as
long as it's set to pen pressure, which is a perfect
for a Wacom pen like this
and you put your minimum all the way down, what you can get
is a brush that gets less opaque as you lift up. So this
is a hundred percent opacity, a fully black thing, full black is
my color.
But see as I lift off I get that. That's pretty cool, right?
So that's - and I can do the exact opposite, go within the
thin. So that's opacity jitter.
And this is quite useful especially for sketching and
it's really nice for
adding tones and shading which we'll get to
shortly, promise.
So and that can combine
transfer with
my opacity menu.
All right. I can keep sketching keep hatching.
Keep adding detail and refining. Let me flip my
imagination drawing here, might be some things off about it.
And of course, whatever you do
to brush you can do to erase. So for example, let's say I do
the eye and I go, oh crap I covered up the pupil. No
worries - or the highlight. Just grab the same style brush and
an eraser works just like brush, especially if the mode
is set to brush. You can play with opacity is 100% opaque or
erase gives you a hard edge. If you want a little bit softer
edge lower the opacity, this is 20% and I can just keep going over
it till the edge feels right, until the highlight feels right. You
know, I can erase that, make it a little bit more subtle,
erase, you know, whatever mark. Mark
Say put some some detail over here and go he's got
too many - he's got too many wrinkles. He looks a little too
old. So just grab my eraser and, you know, start to
do that. And this is a 20 percent eraser. If I go to 80
notice it's more aggressive. So just so many things you can do
with opacity. And the final thing that we can do
is
use hue set.
Hue set's our good friend.
And you're probably going to get sick of me talking about it,
but it's extremely powerful in my opinion.
So let's say for example -
let's say for example -
oh like that tone example.
Tone's ugly. I want to get rid of it.
Let's say for example for this tone.
Make it a hundred percent.
And you may notice that it's not really affecting
the drawing layer, the drawing itself. That's because it's on
another layer. So that's a good habit.
Probably get tired of me saying that too.
So let's say, you know, I
tone his hair, this person has dark hair, my little character here,
but it's a little too dark. What should we do? too dark. What should we do?
Well, because it's on its own layer, I can bring up my buddy
hue set.
Remember command hue, it's an image adjustment. Of course
it's also down here is a layer adjustment. And guess what we
do we - boom. Fine-tune it until we get to perfect value. This
is typically how I work nowadays.
I just drop any old tone, I call up hue set
immediately. Boom. Let's say I want a gradation, the perfect
gradation, from here to the top.
And guess what I'm gonna do here, it's on a new layer. Hue set it up, get
the perfect - boom. Then
merge it down. One more.
Look at that beautiful gradation. Bring up hue set
again. Let's see.
That looks pretty good. Boom. You see how we're able to get nice beautiful
tones using the hue set. Just one one of three ways now that you
know, that's one of three ways to
use your brushes, to get subtlety and to get the most
out of your brushes and to control your brushes. One is
with the opacity control, the brush itself.
Two
is with layers.
Right? If I don't like this layer, if it's too opaque, if
it's too dark too opaque, boom, just drop the opacity.
And the third is hue set. Let's say these lines are too
dark. I can just lighten them.
I can even change their color. Of course we know about
colorize now. So for example, let's say
what I'm gonna do is I'm going to group this sketch. I want to
keep these layers. I'm going to duplicate the group and then
merge this work here. Let's say for example,
I don't like it black and white I can bring up he set click
colorize now. I can color my sketch, my drawing, my tones,
whatever I want.
Let's say what I want to do is really just clean this up. So
I'm going to make it - let's say I'm going to make it blue.
Like that.
Drop the opacity.
And now
I can go over it
with -
again with a
pure black
So I can really clean up the drawing.
Right?
You know, let's say I wanted to get rid of these construction
lines.
All these construction lines. I'm able to do that,
you know, with the many tools, layer tools and so forth.
So I can just keep going.
I clean up my drawing,
right?
Now it's a pure black and white.
Okay, and then we can just boop,
take out our sketch. And this is - a lot of times in one of my
previous lifetimes I did some 2D animation work and you know
animators love to draw on this blue pencil. So this is similar
to animation style drawing. They'll do a blue pencil
drawing like this and then put another sheet of paper, clean
sheet of paper on a light table and then they'll be able to
trace.
Then if you go to drawing, let's say oh I got a drawing
but
you know, the black lines are so boring and ugly, right? We
don't want black lions.
It looks too
dull, too boring. So what we could do is we can change the color
of our lines just bring up hue set, you know, we don't - can't
just make it - we can make it lighter. We can make a darker.
We also colorize.
Click colorize, crank up your saturation and the lightness in
this case because you need a little bit of value to see
color. Need to be in the mid tones.
And look at that now, you know you can make it brown.
And you can play with saturation if it's too
saturated, less saturated. You can just do so many things with
those three controls. So many things.
And finally one last tip I want to show you is to quickly -
let's say I like this drawing and I want to quickly thicken
the lines or thicken the tone. Let's say I
drop a tone. I'm going to color pick this brown.
I just quickly use a big flat brush to tone his hair. But say
oh, I like that but I want it to be thicker. You can just
duplicate the layer. There's two ways to do that. Command J
is the short cut. Boom. Look at that, now it's starting to
stack.
And as I stack, I'm going to merge them down. You can also
just drag it to the new layer button. Boom. Duplicate it,
there it is. Bring up hue set to make it more or less subtle,
darker, less saturated, more saturated. Lots of things you
can do, the same with the ink lines. This is the drawing.
I want to just thicken the lines right away, just boom,
double the layer. So that's just a quick tip that
I use quite a bit. And then merge down, command E, rock and
roll.
Okay, so we touched on brushes. There's a lot more you can do.
Those are just the basics. But like I said, in many times in
previous lessons the basics, of course, we know are the best,
you'll be using them every time, any time, probably for the rest -
as long as Photoshop exist.

Now let's talk about toning. That was a quick look at the
sketching, drawing, hatching, things like that. You know now
you know how to draw, let's drop some tones, add value, add light
and shade. All right. So let's tone this guy let's let's tell them this guy
up, my little my little character here.
Kinda wanna do a figure.
That'll be nice actually.
Okay, so, you know, let's say
I want to start to render and add tones.
Now
typically what I like to do is fill in the big shapes. Of
course, we know
from traditional our traditional training we don't -
we don't do this, right, we don't go, oh tiny shapes first
and then the big shapes later. No, we do the exact opposite. know we do the exact opposite.
We filled the big mass. So to quickly fill large areas, let's
say I just want to quickly fill his face, actually the whole
silhouette his face and his hair. What I like to do is
bring up a lasso tool. So
I like to use polygon lasso simply because it has more
control. So I'm just going to do this. I'm just going to boop,
boop, boop, boop.
You know just kind of go around the border, the silhouette.
Remember double click to close and you can fix any error, you
can cut into it. I don't like that.
Just kind of fix my little spot. Remember it's shift plus
click to add.
Shift alt plus click to subtract, takeaway this little section. when takeaways little section.
Take away this little section here.
Okay.
And now that I have a selection, you see the marching ants and
selection is active.
I just grab my paint bucket, make a new layer. Grab paint
bucket shortcut is G remember also gradient tool is there,
going to pick bucket, pick a color, really doesn't matter
because we have our friend hue set, I'm just going to drop
boom, just a nice little brown.
And it's underneath. I'm going to call this the flat shape,
it's just the outer silhouette.
And what's cool about using marquee is - or marquees and
silhouettes is that now the shape is hard edge, see how
razor-sharp that shape is?
You know, this one is not so sharp. It's a drawing. It's a
sketch and the advantage of this is now we can make, quickly
call up the selection or use it. Let's say I want to use this
selection to add subtle tones
and keep it in there. We can call it up, we can hold
command, click on the layers one way or we can use the magic
wand. Shortcut is w.
I got the magic wand and then just boom, click inside the
shape. It'll draw a perfectly hard edge selection for you.
And then we can use that, we can make a channel out of it and
save it. Remember we covered that in previous lessons, but
quick review. I can just go select, save selection. And
I'll call it
outer shape. That's it. Boom, new channel, then it's here
now. It's here. It's saved and I can call out on it anytime I
want.
So that's a quick way to fill a large mass using marquee.
Another large - for example, let's say I want to fill the
background behind him with some tone. I don't want it totally
white. Just draw a marquee, make a new layer underneath, right?
This is my drawing.
Let me clean this up.
Clean up my layers so you guys don't get confused.
Right?
And then fill it with the tone again, doesn't matter what the
tone is. I'm just going to drop the same - it just happened to
be the same brown and you're like, oh well now I can't
see your tone because hidden same color. Well guess what's
coming? Come in hue, there it is. You're going to get quite
used to this. I'm going to drop. I don't want it
too dark. And this guy's a little too brown for my taste, little too
saturated.
Let's bring him back to - actually that was a nice brown
actually.
It's more of a green.
Let me get the right value first.
That's going to be impossible to get a nice skin tone because
it's flat skin. We know it needs all sorts of variation and
that's what's coming next.
One of my favorite things to do is use the gradation tool. So
let's say I have this flat shape and I want to make it a
little bit darker at the bottom. So I'm going to call up
the gradation tool and I'm going to use flat shape. I'm
going to color pick
his skin color, the one we use hue sat to arrive at, look at
it in color. Okay, it's 71 percent brightness. I'm just
going to drop the brightness.
I'm also going to raise the saturation. If you don't want
your colors in Photoshop to feel flat, you got to treat it
like traditional paint. Let's say I want some of the
background to show through. Let's say instead of using
a flat shape, I can use gradient and this is set to
gradient, set to opacity. I can also do gradient set to another
color but I just like opacity so much. Let's say
what I will do is call up the selection. So either call it up
here or just simply
click
on the layer since the layer's still active and just, whoop,
bring up the gradation. Of course, we know there's three
ways to fine-tune this. This color's ugly. I'm just looking
at it, I'm like ugh it's ugly. I can drop the opacity and make it more
subtle and try it again. Let's try it again.
Over here, pretty cool, huh? Now it's sort of a gradation.
And you know, let's say that color is just it's too grey
right? It needs some saturation. call up hue say, as long as
it's on its own layer it's good to go, change the
temperature a little bit more, little bit more pink like that.
And then of course we can do the exact opposite at the top.
I'm going to change the shape to round and of course the top
get a little bit brighter. So I'm just going to make it a
little bit brighter and maybe make the color more yellow.
Let's say has a yellow light shined on them.
And you know, what
oh,
the hair is on the drawing. I don't know if I like that. I'm
going to put this above the drawing.
That way it kind of lightens the hair just drop the opacity a
little bit.
You see that? And I can even do it
in other places. Keep the selection active again
and do it here on this nose and then I could play with that
opacity. It's on a new layer. Typically every time I
do an operation, I try my best to make a new layer because I
want to fine-tune it every time.
It's very hard to do in traditional, right? You make a
mark in traditional. You have to live with it and work
your butt off to adjust it and fine-tune it but in the
computer, we got layers so we don't have to do that. Makes
your life in computers much much simpler.
You make it more subtle, less subtle, whatever.
So that's using the gradient tool to fill a large space. Now
that you know, like for example, I want to put a
gradient on this background space.
I can just select it. Make sure the selection is active. Use a
flat gradient, get a different color. You know, just I'm just
going to drop the color a little bit. Boom, go reverse.
Let's say it's not dark enough.
You know fine tune it, it's the wrong temperature, fine tune it,
fine tune it, fine tune it, because we can drop the opacity
more subtle less subtle because we can. You see how I use just
three different controls to get the perfect gradation? Boom on
the fly.
And I'm getting excited because
this is hard to do in traditional.
I know you painters out there. Even you draftsman. Look at
these tones. Try doing that in charcoal and then
come back to me. You know this is hard. Try doing that in oil.
Oh my God,
but in the computer
millisecond, you can tell I get excited whenever I use gradient
tools, such a powerful thing. A lot of fun to use.
I will show you guys one more quick thing that I don't use
that much but it's pretty useful. Let's say I want to
fill - let's go back to where we started. Let's say I want - I
make a selection and I want to fill this quickly instead of
making it
perfectly flat like I did earlier and started perfectly
flat. What I could do
is just start with the gradient. And instead of going
gradient to alpha, which is this second box - oh, the options are
here. If you click this bar in your options menu, boom, it'll
bring up gradient editor.
You can click this first one, which is foreground to
background. So whatever my foreground color is, my
background color is. It'll do that. So let's say I
want to change this to not pure white. Let's make it a little White. Let's make it a little
bit like a yellowy light color. Look at that, beautiful. And let's say That beautiful and let's say
make this not pure brown. Let's say more like a reddish say
this guy's got a tan.
So right it's going from this kind of reddish this
yellowy light color. And then -
so instead of going flat, perfectly flat, I can just go
and it draws the gradient right away. Now that was
extremely fast and convenient and has a gorgeous gradient of
course the colors look okay, but the reason why I don't use
it that much because now I really can't control this
yellow. I can't control this pink because
it's on one layer. So that's why I typically don't use
gradient
foreground - a gradient with color all the way through. What
I like is the second box gradient to alpha and use
layers and use clip masks, which we'll talk about right
now.

Okay, so I've been using Photoshop for a long time
professionally at least over a decade. I even teach, you know,
I teach Photoshop too. And I recently discovered - oh, I
don't know if recently but later in my career I
discovered what I'm going to show you now, which is called
clipping mask. And in my mind it's probably one of the most
powerful
things in Photoshop and I use it like
it's almost like paper. I use it almost as much as I use paper.
Every time I sit down to Photoshop I use clipping mask
so I'm going to go over it now. I'm going to go over
slowly. I'm going to
use it quickly once. I'm going to go over it slowly and then I
expect you to practice because - and you probably will because
once you see how fun and powerful it is you're going to
use it every time. You probably saw me do it periodically. I
probably mentioned it. But I'm going to repeat it now. We're
going to cover it now in detail because it's probably my
favorite tool in Photoshop clipping mask let's go. So now
let's get to the bread and butter of the butter. The bread
and butter of our bread, the butter of our bread and butter.
I don't know. I guess the
the software is the bread and the clipping mask is the
butter. I don't know. I don't eat butter either so it really
doesn't matter. So what I'm going to show you is clipping
mask. Now remember
we did this thing - I deleted my layers. We started with this
kind of this
flat shape and then we added a gradient on top using our
selection. Remember we used this selection and then we,
you know, added a -
where'd it go? We added
a gradient on the bottom, right, using our selection.
You know, if we see it's a razor-sharp. One powerful way and
one quick way instead of using selections is to stack your
layers and to clip them which makes a mask called the
clipping mask.
All right, so I'm just going to go very quickly. I'm going to
do it quickly. So first I draw a selection, right?
We know that and then I fill it with a flat shape. We know that
just use good old paint bucket to start with, a nice boom flat
shape, right?
Same with the background.
Fill our background,
make sure it's on its own layer. I'll call it BG, boom
flat shape. That's too dark. Just adjust it, that's too saturated, boom suggest it see saturated boom
right? Quickly
fill the background. Now, I'm going to use clip mask to add
gradations and subtlety. You ready? Make a new layer, do the
clip mask, hold alt. Now what I'm gonna do is bring up
a slightly darker color.
Okay.
A little too far.
Make it a little bit more subtle and going to adjust the
color a little bit. Actually, I like the color.
It's okay actually. Yeah, actually the color was okay. a color was okay
Like that.
Then we do is do another one.
I like that color, gonna drop the opacity. Going to merge these
two clipping masks because I can. I'm going to do
another clip mask. I'd like to get this band under the neck so
I'm going to use this flat gradient and see what that
looks like there.
The shape is a little off.
Kind of want to get that little bit of light tune. You know
in head drawing there's a little bit of tone under the neck
there. The shape is a little off. That's okay.
I can make it a little bit taller actually.
Okay, and then I'm going to fine-tune that.
I'm going to make this one nice and red. That little bit of
tone under the neck, always a little bit of red.
Little bit warm there.
Going to merge that and go up top. Do the reverse at the top.
And his forehead, let's say I want a nice yellowy kind of
glow in his forehead. Let's say there's a - gonna switch it to circular
gradient shape. Make sure it's set to alpha. Gradient to alpha.
Okay. So my first guess at a color looks like total crap.
That's okay. Guess what's coming? Boom, hue set its on
its own layer. Baboom, baboom, and then we can just do it,
tweak it, play with it. Drop the opacity. Make more subtle.
Baboom, baboom, baboom. Just one more.
I get so excited when I use these.
That color is ugly too,
But that's okay. I got our friend hue say, as long as
it's on its own layer, we're good.
Color was okay. It was just a wrong
value. So I'm going to name this
dark half tones.
Name this light variation or call it a dark
variation.
And then one more thing, let's say I want to brush a little
bit of texture, right? Little bit of stubbly texture and a little
bit of blue. We know that -
my painters out there know that
skin doesn't work without blue, especially like a male. If you -
once you add that little bit of razor stubble it just looks so
cool.
Just give it a little bit of texture and tooth there.
I normally have more variety in texture brushes. Just haven't
made them yet.
And we're looking at that go that's way too bright Chris. I
agree. But we got our friend hue sat. You're all Chris
that's way too dark, way too saturated. What are you doing?
What are you doing? What are you doing?
Don't worry. My friends hue sat, clip mask, and layer opacity set clip mask and layer opacity
coming to the rescue. Look at that, looks so beautiful now. Can
just make it as subtle and as perfect as you want. Try doing
that - try doing that operation in oil paint and get back to me.
My painters out there know that that was a pain in the butt. I
did in just half a millisecond.
Let's say one last thing. I'll call this cool.
Let's say I want to add some freckles.
Just going to color pick.
Make sure I clip to the freckles.
I really don't need the clip this.
You see? Boom.
Make it subtle, change the color. Let's say I want them
to be -
want them to be blue liver spots. I don't know why a young
guy would have liver spots. But okay,
so that's it. Call it freckles detail.
Forgive me if I misspelled it.
Save it real quick.
Alright, so that was a quick demo of clip mask. Now, let's
go over it slowly. In fact, I don't like these layers.
Okay, so clip mask basically is a layer that uses the layer
underneath as a mask. And this works best when you have a hard
edge shape. That's why I always always always always start with
a hard edge shape, right? This shape is hard edge versus
like something like our drawing right, it's got some gaps, some of
the lighter, some darker, not opaque. This is 100% opacity
with the razor-sharp edge, especially true because we use -
you can tell we used a lasso tool. Look at that looks like a
Russian Academic Drawing a bunch of straights.
So it works best with a fully opaque layer.
So all you got to do is bring up a new layer.
Right? Right above the layer that you want to add, you
know, let's say I want to add darker gradient from the bottom
up, lighter gradient from the top down. So I bring up a new
layer and what I do is I hold alt and then move my cursor
between the two layers and you see the icon change. It was
like a little finger hand. Boom, hold alt, move to the line. See
the line? See the icon change? So line, hold alt. Now it's ready to
clip and then you click boom. Then you see that that little
arrow see that that means this layer is clipped to this layer.
Now flat shape is now what's called the parent, this is the
child, but you don't really - doesn't really matter. So now
everything I do in this layer I'm just gonna do something
crazy like brush some pink, right? Everything I do in this
layer
is contained by what's underneath which is a razor
sharp shape that I consciously made. So it's masking - this is
being masked by this layer that it's clipped to because it's
clipped to this layer. It's masking it. So watch - the moment
I unclip it,
boom. See that, isn't it awesome? I love it.
Unclipped. It's on its own layer.
You know, it's on its own layer. You can move it around. The moment
I clip it, locked razor tight to the shape. And the
reason that's the clip part
is clipping it to the layer beneath it and you can add as
many as you want. Let's say I want to add a
neon green, let's say I you know, I have a two-year-old nephew
who comes in and once this start adding neon green things,
as long as it's clipped, right, you can add, it doesn't go
outside the boundary and I can just stack all day long, all day
long, and just go into clip mask joy, you know, now starting to
look like a modern piece or something and then, you know,
you can merge them command E. You can merge all your clip masks.
So that's the clip part. Now the other way -
the reason why it's called clip mask is because it works
exactly like a mask. Remember that's what we did earlier. We
made a selection, right? and then, you know, we made a
selection and then we did -
you know, exact kind of the same thing, but the difference here
with the selection - I'm going to deselect it, turn the
drawing off - it only stays within the bounds of the
selection, right?
Which is the clip mask you have a lot of it and because
it's
I like this better because obviously you can move it
around and find tune it, you know, you know how much I love to
fine-tune things and you know, the clip mask also works like a
layer mask. So let's say I select - I have my selection
active that I already made and I saved, I make a new layer, then
I hit this alpha mask button. Well the selection's active
boom. It'll draw the mask and now I can do the exact same
thing boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop.
Right as we saw earlier because it's masked too so if I turn off
the mask for example see, I'm turning off the mask, see how it
goes outside the bounds of the mask? So that's pretty cool.
And this is useful to because
you know, like for example
the dark hair is above the drawing. Let's say I want to
add some highlights to the drawing. But you know, I don't
want to go outside of the shape. So I just make a mask. I
select the shape,
make the mask, make my selection active, make the mask.
Now he can draw like I don't know, like
yellowy brown highlights, but still stay locked within the
shape,
right?
That's because this is above the drawing. If I put it below the
drawing, right, and I clip it, the work that I just did
you don't see it because it's you know, it's below the
drawing.
It's below the drawing, right, this bit of tone I the this bit of tone. I
mistakenly put on the drawing. I normally don't do that.
Normally, this would be empty space and that hair would
be on its own layer of course for hue sat reasons. So that's
that's the magic of clip masks. It works exactly like a mask
and
it's versatile like a mask, but it's real easy to apply. Just
hold alt, put your cursor in between the two layers, hold alt
and boom.
That's a power of a clip mask, works exactly like a layer mask
or alpha mask.
See that? Now I will show you what happens when you try to do
this when
the layer beneath the parent layer - remember the parent layer
has to be opaque. Let's say
you know, let's say I start painting, you
know, you just saw this lesson and you're super exciting like,
oh man that looks so easy and fun. Let me try it.
All right. Chris said I can use opacity. I can use
transfer. Let's use transfer. All right. Now I'm ready to
fill in my face, fill in my character, right and you character? Right and it's a you
know, you kind of kind of do it quickly and rush, you want
want to make it more subtle.
Right. So you have something like this, if I try to clip it
and I go oh, well, I saw a Chris use the clip
mask and the gradient tool. Let me try that. If I do that,
so just quickly darken it, see how it's not as clean as it
does affect the pixels, right, but our pixels aren't clean.
They're not tight, right ?So
you have to have really tight pixels to get the full effect.
So that's why I always start with a razor-sharp, just a flat
old shape, and then what I do now you're getting to see my
approach is just the clip mask all the way up at gradation, at
texture and detail, variation bubba, bubba, bubba, bubba, bubba
all starting with the base of a razor sharp flat shape that I
drew with the lasso tool and fill with the paint bucket and
then boom boom boom boom. boom boom boom, clip mask,
clip mask, clip mask, clip mask, clip mask, clip mask, clip mask with mouse. Click Mouse. Click
right? Starting to see the MO here. see the mo here.
All the way until you get a nice beautiful Warhol guys nice beautiful Warhol
looking thing or whatever this is.
And all the clip mask, you can merge them,
merge them all the way down. And you see the moment you unclip
it it just goes by, just goes all over the place.
That's the power of clip mask.
So let me
quickly add some tone. I just have so much fun doing this.
And you know, you can see I'm
pretty fast.
Here using warp tool.
That's the beauty of - I need it to curve actually,
that's the beauty of a clip mask. If it's on its own layer,
you can do so many things to it. You can fine tune it all
day long.
And I'm going to erase out a little bit.
Remember eraser you can drop the opacity and make it subtle.
I don't want it on his -
I need to make a texture brush. I don't like that one.
I don't like this one.
And let's add some blue stubble back. This one's a little too
red, little too opaque. Bring it back.
I'm just going to brush some blue.
I almost can just randomly arbitrarily pick any
color like this.
Definitely the wrong color, but
close
enough to do this. Da da doop, da da doop, da da doop. doop de doop.
Drop the opacity.
Do a subtle erase just to get some cools in there. Okay,
so that's that's pretty close. And I'm going to merge these
clip layers and call it variation.
Save my file.
All right. So let's say we want to do some detail. Let's say we
want to render the nose and render the eyes. Let's start
with the detail. Well one thing I like to do - well first this drawing
is just too opaque. So I'm going to drop the opacity.
Probably start going over the drawing soon. I will if I want
to add hair detail, which I'll do in a moment.
So what I like to do is use a combination of clip mask
and -
clip mask and lasso tool. So I'm going to make a new layer, just
call it a nose.
And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to draw just a rough mask and this
mask will be obviously it'll be way too hard for what we need it
to do.
But for now, it's okay.
Okay,
and what I'm going to do is
I'm actually going to clip it.
Oh actually I don't need to clip it because clipping only
affects if you need to go outside the border like we did
with this gradient, but this one - I'm only going to stay
at the nose. So inside the silhouette.
I'm going to make a
more saturated gradations. So I'm going to use gradation tool,
start with the linear.
Use linear.
Okay.
And I'm going to fine tune it.
Actually might be a little bit more pink. Yes. That's what I
wanted.
Kind of get that blushy nose look. Actually going to do that again.
Going to do it
all the way up.
Okay.
So then if I wanted to do a smaller shape like the nose, I
can just fill it with - I could draw the marquee around the
shape.
Do the operations, in this case a couple gradients, then I can
merge the nose. Gonna call it the nose again, and then I could
take an airbrush too, the edge is too hard. We don't want that. Take
an airbrush eraser
and just boop,
just subtly erase the edge, just blend it. You can also use the
mask which probably be smarter. Remember if you use mask I
would have preserved these pixels. Now that I'm using erase
those pixels are gone forever.
It means if I don't like what I'm doing, I'm in trouble. I
just have to do a lot of undos.
So that's combination
of
using the lasso tool. Let's say I want to do a quick
highlight.
Just going to draw
a highlight shape on his nose. And then what I'm going to do
is,
I'm going to do two things.
Well first I'm going to -
yeah first I'm going to feather modify
the selection using feather. So it's selection, modify feather.
Let's say make it four.
Four is the number of pixels, it's a little bit subtle. I'm going
to fill this with
the paint bucket not gradation tool. I'm going to do
a couple of things really cool.
I'm just going to actually gonna color pick that light on his a color pick that light on his
head to make it more consistent.
So that was four. Now I'm going to do - I'm going to make a new
clip mask, going to put it beneath
that highlight I just made. What I'm going to do is
select modify feather again, but I'm going to feather it
like 15 times, I don't know 20, let's try 20. 20 might be too
big. Yeah it's too big.
If you try to feather it and it's - the pixel, the pixel
amount of feathering is bigger than the actual selection then
it won't work.
So that's what that warning was. I just brought it back.
And say I want to do 10,
huh?
It's too much. So we need some more pixels and say
I'll make a bigger one.
Now I'm going to fill - excuse me - select, modify feather. Let's do
this one, let's do 12. Okay now it's working.
I'm gonna pick that same color,
keep it active. I'm going to make it a little bit more red,
but still bright. Okay, drop it in there. So now you see it's
subtle, drop it there. This one is a little more subtle, drop it
there. And of course I can erase, change the shape, or brush
back on it if I wanted to.
I think the shape is a little off so I'm just going to erase
it because it's on its own layer. I can do this.
Shape is a little off. Okay.
So I also need it on the wing. I'm just going to manually
brush it now.
Yeah, that's what I need right there, that little bit of wing
highlight the brush and that's what we're going to talk about now
is adding details with brush. So that was an example of using
selection tool to add detail.
And I'm going to merge these two layers. Now I have a nice
nose. You see we're starting - we're beginning to render.
Let's say I want to render this eye. So I'm going to make a new
layer and I can clip it or don't clip it. I'm just going
to clip it just to keep it nice and clean.
Let's say he has
a dark cool shadow under his eye.
I know it's a -
I'm using what kind of brush. Oh, it's just airbrush. It's just
fine.
Even though it's airbrush I can get really dark as long as it's
really opaque. Right now it's pretty opaque.
So you can you just zoom in
and add all the detail you want using all the brush commands
that we mentioned earlier. Say I want to start to paint the
the white of his eye.
The eye should be
kind of blue.
It's a little too pink there. Going to be set to fine tune it, bring
it more to like the...
Okay. So now I have this dark - let's say I want to make it a little with a want to make it a little
bit darker. Just bring up command U, look at that, command you he's look at that
look how perfect that is.
I love this tool so much.
This tool and clip mask are like my best friends.
Let's say I want to - I like the detail. So this is my I render
so far.
Let's say I want to draw a really sharp pupil. So I can either
draw it with my lasso,
like that,
and fill it with a color, just going to randomly pick a
pretty dark color for - it's going to be so dark it really
doesn't matter.
Okay, so it's got to go above drawing.
Right now the drawing - yeah typically I don't make the
drawing this thick and then I can adjust
that. I'm color picking that eye,
putting it there.
The pupil. And then if I want to
cut out of it, of course, I can just -
lots of tools I can just do the marquee again. Let's do
that again. Let's do make a new layer, you know, whenever I do
new operation I make a new layer.
I'm going to use circular marquee. I'm going to feather
it a little bit. Select, modify feather.
And let's make it only two pixels because it's so small.
And then fill it - just fill it with a white. Pure White. Boom.
Got my little highlight, think it's a little too bright. So
I'm just bring up hue sat, baboom.
Pretty cool, right? And one last thing is another gradient tool.
Let's say I want to make his eyes blue, but I want that
beautiful gradient, you know eyes have that beautiful
gradient. So one thing we could do is
draw the selection.
Should probably use a - I tried to draw it.
And this
part doesn't matter, we can totally erase it.
Going to call this pupil.
And then
what I'm going to do is put it underneath the drawing and then
I'm going to fill it paint bucket style with some kind of
blue.
That's a little too blue.
Okay,
and then
I'm going to draw a mask. I lost my selection, remember
because this is a perfectly flat shape that I made I'm
able to call up its election just by holding command and
clicking and then make a new layer above it.
And then use gradient tool. Boom. Boom. Boom.
Of course, that's the wrong blue. It doesn't matter, bring
up hue sat again, command U.
And fine tune it till we get perfect blue gradient. We want -
now you're seeing the drawing show through, that's why
I don't recommend doing - normally don't do a drawing
that intense and then
to get rid of that top part mask or erase. This time going
to use an erase and I want a hard edge. So I'm going to
bring up a hard edge brush and whack whack whack whack whack.
Good
You see how we're able to get this the small shapes, the
details with
manual brushing just like we do in traditional combined with
also with gradient tool using lassos. And of course clip mass
to keep everything locked in the shape.

One last thing is making a nice adjustment using layer
adjustments and other things we could do. So let's say we have
a nice background here. Let's get rid of these. This is our
background. Of course, it's too flat. We don't like that.
We can add a tone.
Of course that blue is too ugly, doesn't matter.
Bring up hue sat, change it up.
Drop the opacity.
Even add a little bit of texture if we wanted,
let's try that.
I got to get some better texture brushes.
This one's not clipped. You can see I'll try to make it but I
forgot to clip it. Uh, there you go, drop the opacity, play
with the color.
I'm bringing up an eraser here just to erase, just to give me
some texture. I don't like that texture
that I had.
That brush is so ugly.
Okay.
Merge that, call it variation.
And I'm going to merge these two, the background and the
variation. You know, the background, there's really no
detail, doesn't need to be too precise. So I can merge the
layers. So now I'm going to call up layer adjustments.
Let's call up
brightness contrast and say I want more contrast in the
background to make it darker, more contrasty. Say I want
less contrast, make it a little bit brighter. There you go. I like
that better.
There's one thing to do. And the advantage again of a layer adjustment is
its own layer, turn it on and off to check, drop its
opacity to make it subtle, and you can go back into it. That's
the advantage of doing that versus directly on the layer
bringing up hue sat for example or brightness contrast.
Because this will affect the layer but I can't find tune it,
I don't have as many controls if it's not on its own
layer. That's one advantage of that. And one thing I like to
use adjustment layers for is to make vignettes. So, for
example,
we can bring up hue sat, you're going to get tired of this he's going to get tired of this
guy. Say I want to drop the opacity. This one I'm going to
clip. I'm going to clip it because I don't want it to
affect the white around it. Gonna drop the opacity and let's make
it a little bit more saturated actually. And what color should
we go? Let's make it whatever, this color. This is color.
And then what I'm going to do is use because it's own mask I'm
going to use the mask to make a vignette. So use circular
gradient, bring up the mask. Make sure my opacity is 100%
and make sure I'm using pure black and wow look at that
beautiful gradient.
I love it.
And
of course because when it's on its own thing you can fine-tune it something you can fine-tune it
as subtle as you want. It looks pretty good. I'm pretty
happy with that.
And let's say
I want to affect - let's say I want to affect the head as it
is right now, but I want to also affect the drawing. So
that means I can't be beneath the drawing because it's
clipped, right? If I clip it I'll be underneath the drawing
and I won't be able to affect the hair. So I want to do is
I'm going to make
a selection of the shape I want to affect and luckily my
flat shape, right, nice and tight. I also want to affect
the pupil. So I'm going to bring up -
let's bring up levels. Let's increase the contrast. So bring
up levels and levels, when you call up an adjustment layer
with a selection active, you saw the little marching ant
things, it draws the perfect selection mask for you. So now
I only affect what's on my layer.
And it affects everything beneath it that's within the confines
of the mask. And I'll show you what happens if it's not masked
in a minute. Say the moment I unmask it or turn off the mask,
see how it affects everything? Which doesn't look too bad
actually. This is only affects what's in the mask,
which is the character, this affects the entire frame
including what's outside -
it affects the entire canvas, which doesn't look too
bad actually.
Okay, so that's just a quick look at the power of adjustment
layers, masking and clipping to get all kinds of events. Okay,
well that was
all the tools you need to draw and shade now you're ready to
go, go do your thing, make your own comps, black and white
comps, colorize them to whatever.
I believe this set of tools is probably
the most useful tools and why Photoshop is so powerful. I
mean you saw me getting excited and you saw some of the things
we were able to do that are just incredibly laborious to do
the old school way. Only the Masters can make beautiful
gradients like that. But yeah, you put - you got everything. If you
need to get confused please review, go back to previous
lessons. I know I went through a little bit fast but probably by
now you're also a little bit more experienced if you've been
following along. So hope you had fun. Now we're going to get
to the assignment so you can test your skills.

Now we're going to get into the assignment and the assignment
will have two different parts to it or two different separate
assignments. The first is we're going to learn how to draw and
tone from scratch. So what I'm going to have you do is draw a
skull either from imagination or reference if you have
your own reference, make sure there is good lighting. And
you're going to draw it as if you're drawing on paper using
Photoshop and then you're going to add light and shadow and
shade, just like you would do with traditional medium
we're going to use Photoshop and all the tools
that we covered in the lesson. So that's the first part,
drawing a skull lighting and shading. Okay. So our first
assignment we're going to draw something and
add tone and light and shadow. So treating this exactly like if I
was drawing on a piece of paper, we're going to show you
how to use Photoshop to mimic that process and to make it
smooth and fun. So this first one will be a skull. I'm going to - Move be a skull I'm going to
I'm going to use reference, you can draw from imagination. You
can use - you can also use your own picture. I just chose this
color because I like them and you know,
it's good, it's good practice to be able to draw it from
memory. So let's get started with the first assignment. All
right, so we make a new little canvas. It's good sized, eight by
ten.
So
I have the reference.
Okay, here's my reference.
Make sure it's a untabbed. Where's my -lost my other one.
So it's always under window. If you lose your windows you can
find them under the window, file menu. Going to make this a
little bit smaller. I don't really need to see it. So first
I'm going to sketch. I'm just going to sketch and draw. I
already got
my brush made. But instead of drawing on the flat background
I always like to make a new layer.
So I'm just going to kind of draw.
and this drawing brush already has the things I like and I'm
actually
drawing it full opacity, but changing the color to really
light color, this kind of like drawing with the
light pencil almost or I like to draw with - lately
I like to draw with colored pencils and
they come in various different shades of gray so it's kind of
like that.
So just quickly draw my skull and kind of try to draw the rest
from memory here. I'm just going to use the reference for
lighting.
I'm not looking, I swear, drawing from memory I think.
I'm not going to do fully rendered skull here. Just kind
of show you the process, you know, for example, let's say
you shot this reference, but you want to test out different
compositions.
This is where it's at. This is
probably one of the most useful I would say, if not the most
useful thing, about Photoshop is making your own comps, making
your own comps and adjusting your comps and that's what this
lesson is all about.
Okay. I looked a little bit, had to fine tune that shape a the fine tune that shape a
little bit.
Fine tune this shape. Skulls are so fascinating to me.
And they
are a great way to practice head drawing.
And
remember the portrait - or not the portrait little
invented head, little character I drew from imagination, little
head
drawing was a little too intense.
A little too,
you know, it's just too dark.
I filled in areas which I shouldn't have.
Now what I'm going to do is drop the opacity and to make a
new layer. So I'm going to paint with a little darker
brush.
And I'm going to make it -
make sure transfer is on and then I'm going to make it
80% because what I want to do is sort of clean up some of the
work. So
again, the power of Photoshop is exactly like a light box,
right, if you've ever drawn a light box or an animation
table,
so exactly like that.
Just cleaning up my shapes
because I don't want too many construction lines. Although I
like them. Actually I do like them, but if I wanted to make a
more
serious looking, realistic looking I guess. I don't know.
Just make sure some of the shapes look good, major shapes.
This part is fine. You're going to have a lot of fun sketching,
I can already tell. I remember first time I played with the
computer, man I had so much fun.
Especially if you have a
really good tablet and a pretty strong computer it's quite
helpful.
You see how useful the layer and opacity techniques are, very
useful.
Okay, and yeah, it looks pretty good.
Now instead of, you know, that looks pretty cool. Instead of
deleting that layer I'm just gonna drop the opacity even
more. So I like some of that grit and some of that noise. I
don't know if you can see it now, it's super subtle. So
let's make it like 20% and then I'll keep this at a hundred
percent. And then merge the two and I'll call it drawing or
line art. Whatever.
Alright, so let's say I want to test the compositional idea.
I might have made a series of thumbnails that I
liked. So let's say -
let's say a kind of want to match this background. Nice
chiaroscuro, meaning dark, against the dark background
like a Caravaggio and then
Let's try that. So first, I'm going to fill the tone nice and
like a nice midtone.
Then I'm going to add a little bit of texture
with my ugly texture brushes.
And we do this black and white.
And I'm going quickly here.
A lot of these tools
We covered already.
I'm doing just making
a little noise.
Combining techniques to get the noise I want.
And I actually want to reverse this. I want it to go instead
light to dark, reverse opposite light to dark. So I'm going to
take the layer that has the variation, call it variation,
call this BG.
And I'll go to rotate it.
Well expand it a little bit, play with it.
Because it's on its own layer you can do that. Change the
direction. Boom.
Let's see if I can adjust that,
get rid of that little line. Nice and a little bit of noise
and detail and texture just a little bit.
Normally, I would have some really nice of brushes
because it's just it's more fun. This simulates
drawing paper. I love to draw on tone paper, 9 out of 10
times I draw it on tone paper and it has a little bit of texture.
So again simulating a traditional. Okay. So that was
my BG. I'm going to go ahead and merge it.
It was easy to make, it's not a big loss. My drawing is here.
I got a bunch of extra layers for some reason. So now what
I'm going to do is make the flat boom, boom, boom. Boom,
boom, boom. Just draw my - whoops. Make sure I got the right lasso
active.
Just going to quickly block in the silhouette.
Okay,
call this flat and I'm going to fill this
with a flat shape.
Let's say right now, it's - let's make it 50 nice and even
right down the middle. 50%
You see some of the old ghost line showing through. Yeah, I
don't like that. I don't like that at all. What I'm gonna do is -
I wasn't expecting that because what happened is because
the lines, remember I started the drawing with really
light color. That's kind of working against me now. So what
I want to do is make the whole thing black as if it were
black.
And instead of
dropping the brightness of the color of the marks, making it
brighter, I'm going to drop the opacity. Because eventually I'm
going to paint over the drawing to get little bit more, but I
like the look of it intact. It just looks cool to me.
Okay, so I got a flat but you know flats are flat. And
artists we don't like that. We don't like that. dressed me. We don't like that.
We know things must have gradation. So I'm kind of going
to treat it like I did the background. Let's try that.
There's so many ways to add texture. There's lots of
filters we can use, we've used filters in previous lessons. So
I'm just going to
bring up this guy.
Actually I don't like this brush at all. It's a little too... fruit, too.
I really have to get my own.
The spacing is not enough. There it is.
There it is. A little bit more space. Yeah. I'm going to
make that more subtle. Do the reverse for the top. I'm going
to pick a different texture. Take this take this.
lighter one - whoops. It's not clipped. That's why it's going
outside the bounds.
Save it.
Okay.
You can change the order too of your clip masks. This one I'm
going to do a dissolve, which kind of gives me a little bit
of texture. It's a dissolve. That function is right here
under mode.
Little bit of texture and dirt.
I like that.
I normally make a dirt brush. I have one at home.
And I'm going to do one more pass
of the
the dirt
and then
make it more subtle by using a clean
gradation.
This time round shape masking it.
Even more subtle, a little too dirty. Okay, it's perfect. This is
variation, variation. And I have light, dark variation, light
variation. Beautiful for my flat is old boring.
Just going to mix it, merge them.
All right,
call this.
Okay. Now
what I like to do is
make - just like we started with a flat shape and then we add
clipping mask, gradations, and rendering for the shape itself,
I do it also for the shadow. So
what I like to do is just brush the shadow as if it were a hard
edge shape and I'm going to try to use this brush.
So little too
texture-y.
Yeah, and then see if I direction -
direction, okay.
So it's going to kind of - kind of look
like a -
kind of chalky brush.
I'm gonna turn transfer off.
I want to be a little bit opaque. I'm just going to use a little
bit lower.
Well -
yeah, actually, let me turn transfer back on.
Yeah, because I don't - actually I'll take that back, turn
transfer off. I need it to be hard-edged. It's just not
the right brush.
So 80 percent opacity should give me enough subtlety. So
what I really want is stuff like that, little bit kind of
like a pencil. So
I'm going to pick not so aggressive color to start with,
pure black. Right now the base is about 50% so I'm gonna drop it
to 25% or so.
And then I'm going to just start brushing the shadow
shapes that I see.
I already started to outline some of them.
Actually, let me go back to a hundred percent because
remember we saw what happened when the layer that we clip to
isn't fully opaque. The effect is very weird. We don't want
that. I'm just going to kind of
trust in the process there.
Because right now I'm - my mind is switching to traditional.
As a traditional artist I'm like oh, oh can't make the shadow
too opaque, right? We know when we paint we want to make the
shadows generally transparent so they sink back, right, in the
3D space.
And notice I'm trying to be careful because it's not
clipped. I didn't clip it. So I wanted to show you what happens
when you don't clip.
But look down here, look it's going outside the boundary.
Actually, I do want that a little bit and I'll show you - I'll
explain that in a second. It's kind of reason why I didn't
clip.
Make sure that eye is nice and tight and these little smaller
shapes, not too worried about, they're important but not right
now. We know that
when we draw and paint, we always want to focus on the big
shapes first, the big masses, of course, we know that.
If you've seen other lessons on NMA, you probably heard that
ad infinitum to infinity.
Okay, that's my shadow shape, needs some masking. Gonna call it shadow.
So what I'm going to do is instead of clipping it like
that, what I want to do is I want to make a mask because the
shadow needs to be its own body, needs to be its own body. So
I'm actually - because it's fully opaque and I like the shape,
I'm going to first make a mask and then instead of making a
mask,
I'm just going to delete it. And there's two ways to do that.
Basically
delete the stuff that goes outside of the shape that I
want to mask.
I can either just do this, just erase - oops make sure I'm on the layer.
Erase the layer and remember you see me on doing it's always
control Z, control Z to go back. So I can do that or
that I can do
is merge layers. And I'll show you that
in a minute, but let me just leave the mask on there for
now. Now the reason why I do that, why don't clip it, is because
I want the shadow to be its own entity because I'm going to
clip boom, boom, boom, boom onto the shadow itself.
Just like we do it very with the skull shape. I'm going with the skull shape. I'm going
to clip on the shadow itself.
Shadow is going to be its own layer, its own entity that sits
above the image, is kind of like imagine a
piece of tracing paper on top of your drawing or an
animation, another sheet of animation paper on top of a
light table.
So now I need to make a cast shadow, so I'm going to zoom
out a little bit.
And I'm going to do a quick cast shadow. So I'm going to
make a new layer and call this shadow two, should call
it cast shadow. And what I'm gonna do is draw a marquee, some draw a marquee
just to quickly fill the shape of the table
and
that was the circular marquee. Draw an oval and then paint
bucket, boom.
Now I don't want it
to fill this stuff so I can either erase it or just mask
out, but I'll show you.
Actually I can do that. Now I could just drop the mask in but I'm going
to adjust the shape of my shadow a little bit. It won't
be a perfect circle of course. I'm gonna bring my eraser back.
I'm going to make this a new brush preset.
Just change the shape of the marquee a little bit
because the light's coming from here. So this part will
probably not be in shadow, even though the table.
So now shadow is on its own entity. See its own little
entity, its own little body. And of course, what do we do with
the shadow? Just like leave variation. Now you would variation that it is the
don't have e to do this step. I just like it
because you know, there's dark parts of the shadow, there's
lighter parts of the shadow. We know that
and we look at the reference, see how the eyes are lighter,
the nose is darker. The occlusion shadow is brighter.
So this area is darker. So go ahead and darken that up.
See how beautiful that looks? Just love it. I just love it.
I just love the clip mask. It never gets old when I watch it
my God, it's so powerful. Two layers of it
because I can because it's Photoshop, you can make layers
infinitum,
all day every day.
Just keep making layers until it looks right.
Gonna lighten that a little bit. I'm going to save the darks
for the end.
Just want to lighten that
shadow a little bit. Actually gonna like this whole area a
little bit.
I just needed to lighten that part. Okay,
okay.
Actually using airbrush. I like using texture brush so much it
can get a little bit aggressive.
Okay. Forgot the occlusion shadow gets a little bit darker
than you know.
And I'm going to lighten
the area around the eye socket a little bit, just a little bit,
make it super subtle. Just use airbrush little bit in the
nose. This is reflected light coming inside and bouncing
around in there. Drop the opacity to make it more subtle.
Let's see where else we can go. I'm just looking for any reason
to add variation. It doesn't really belong there for that
part.
Okay,
now I got shadow flat variation.
So that's pretty good. Now to quickly add a tone and a
highlight. That's really all we need right? Actually I'm going
to darken the background. So I'm going to bring up a layer
adjustment.
Just do that, just to test it.
And I'm liking that, I'm liking that. Actually this can go
darker at the bottom, but I'll do that at the top. So I like
the new dark background. I can merge it but I'm just going to
leave it as it is.
So now I'm going to go back to the flat layer. And now I can
clip it because the shadow with its own body, its own layer, its
own entity.
And what I'm going to do is
going to do some gradations, going to go lighter and darker.
Start with the -
from the bottom up,
from the side out.
Side plane.
I'm going to
mask some of that out.
Looking beautiful love it.
I'm going to mask some of this out.
Yeah, let me try a mask. There's a part here that needs
to be masked out. There it is, it's very subtle. just very subtle.
There's form here.
Yeah, typically by like to do is instead of manually brushing
these tones I like to use gradients as much as possible.
With clip mask, of course.
That way it makes the tones very smooth.
And a little bit lighter up top. And this one I'm going to
use combination of dissolve. Just going to pick pure white.
Just go whoop.
Whoop. Everywhere I see a little bit of light I'm going
to use a dissolve layer. Whoop.
Whoop.
And one more at the bottom. And I'm putting three highlights on
three different layers and explain that in a minute.
Because I want to be able to manipulate them independently
of each other.
This bottom one should go really subtle. So drop the
opacity. This middle one less subtle.
And the top one the most brightest, because you know you
want that egg effect. So that's why three different layers
and because it was on dissolved mode.
And now I'm going to
use a smooth gradient
and just change the shape a little bit.
I want it to match that highlight there.
Warp it a little bit.
Sort of match the shape, drop the opacity. Don't want it to be
that bright. I'm going to brush that in manually. I just want
to set it, set the table for it.
Merge that. So call it
lights. I'm going to merge these, I like these. Apply and
call them shadow
or dark half tones.
That's what HT is, half tone/
And let's see, now I'm just going to randomly brush
some texture using this brush, some light color texture.
This is way too aggressive, let me drop the opacity. we drop the opacity.
Still not completely happy with the texture. I normally have a
a good texture brush, that kind of looks like skull or bone actually
or rock. It's really cool.
This one will work. And let's erase out with another one.
And this part isn't necessary. I mean you can literally take a
picture of bone and use it as a photo texture.
It's just
but I like to do it manually just for fun. I like that, gives
a little bit of texture, lightens the value little bit.
Boom.
So that's really the beginning of the render because of course
next we know we have to
quickly do the transition and the little bit of tones and
then we'll finish up this demo here.
And the transition is simply the transition from shadow to
light
at the core shadow.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to just pick a dark
color, make a new layer, of course.
And for this I'm going to use transfer, make sure transfer's on, and
I'm going to use
some opacity.
Just to get that nice subtle
look and you know, of course I could use hue sat to fine-tune
whatever I do at this stage.
And this is a lot of fun because to me, this is very
close to how I work
in traditional medium
basically just doing the transition tones. That's what
this step is right here.
It's the tones and go from core shadow into light.
So we know,
my painters out there, my draftsman know.
They know what's up. They know this step is important.
I've some nice half tones here. I'm going to use another
texture brush.
Because really what I'm thinking of is value shapes, you know,
obviously I'm working in sort of a dark to light manner.
So subtle half tones there and if I want to go even more
subtle, I can just drop my opacity even more
and even change the color if I want, right?
So I'll bring that back.
Bring some of that back there.
And you know, I can just take it as far that I want to go
now.
I don't want to take it all the way.
So we'll call this a core shadow.
Let's see what I'm going to do. I'm gonna do this little bit of
texture here.
I should probably make a mask, which I will in a second. Gonna
draw a selection here.
So what I want to do is like something like this.
Get those
texture tones in the side plane there.
Erase out with another.
Yeah looks pretty cool. That edges is cool. It's a little
too hard.
So I'm actually going to merge, going to make this, drop the
opacity and just merge that so it's all one layer.
Okay. There you go.
So that was my core shadow. My lights are pretty much there
so what I want to do is just add highlights in the fine details
now.
Lots of ways to add this highlight. What I'm going to do is
I'm going to draw
a -
draw a lasso.
I'm going to feather it, select modify feather. Just give it
like two pixels, drop in the light tone. Oops.
There we go, and then I'm going to erase
out.
Doesn't look as good as I like actually now that I see it.
Let's try this. Yeah, it doesn't look that good. That
wasn't good idea.
That looks okay. So I'm just going to brush it in manually.
Probably what I should have done earlier.
And edge little hard, so I'm just going to bring up, new
brush, airbrush it.
So call this highlight.
That's what HL means.
Let's see. I remember you can always undo with control Z, that
erases too strong.
Okay, and
now I can just go down the figure or the skull here and
add the small highlight shapes.
I'm using a fairly hard edge brush about.
That's okay because I can always erase, I can even blur it
with the filter if I wanted.
So I know, I know, I know, I know
these
tones are way too bright. I, know I know.
But in case you haven't noticed yet, it really does not matter
what you throw down first because you can always adjust
it.
And that goes for any operation
in Photoshop.
And I like to combine little bit of line.
You see starting to add detail.
So I can either
call up hue sat,
make it lighter or darker or just drop the opacity. Just
think I'm just going to drop the opacity, make it more subtle. That
way it'll layer on top and add its own a noise. So you can
just layer on top, add its own bit of noise.
It looks pretty cool.
When I say noise I mean like, you know fine grain texture
detail. So it's kind of like the bone itself has that,
has its own like noise pattern detail, has little pits and
crevices we can totally
mimic and
brush onto our effect.
Alright, so I'm pretty happy with that. One last thing I
want to do is this highlight
is
put a little bit of a
light shape on the foreground and add a vignette. I'm just
going to add a circular gradient. I'm going to add the
noise pattern. I like to just need some noise. So under mode.
Dissolve, excuse me.
This makes it noisy gradation
like that. Then we do a filter.
Blur, motion blur.
One of the many blurs we can use.
I don't like that direction.
That one's okay, and then drop the opacity. So what I want is
that feeling that light is hitting this surface.
And I'm going to apply a gradation to make it a little
bit more subtle. Like that. Oops, make sure that noise is just make sure that noise it's
normal.
Okay, then finally, I could put a vignette around the whole
thing. I like vignettes. So bring up hue sat at the very
top so it affects the entire canvas, drop the opacity.
And then we can use gradient tool to unmask or to bring
back. Boom. Nice little vignette. So it looks like a spooky skull
and a dark room, kind of like the reference.
Alright, so that's the end of this assignment. Hope you
enjoyed it. Please please please practice. Please review.
I know I went quickly. Probably by now, you're a pro and all
these tools you saw in this lesson and you know, we built
upon previous lessons so review this, practice it, draw your own
skull. Draw something else more simple. I know skull's little
hard to draw but as long as you understand the concepts
that things go on their own layer, drawings should go in its
own layer, the toning should go on its own layer, highlights should on layer highlights Shadows.
go on its own layer and long as you understand the power of
clip masks, masking and using a gradation tools and selections
to fill big areas and playing with your brushes you're going
to be a pro. So that's in this lesson and let's move on to the
next assignment.

Okay in this second assignment, we are going to use Photoshop
to create comps based on a drawing. So we're going old
school here. What we're going to do is we're going to take a
drawing that we drew on paper, scanned into the computer,
we're going to bring it into Photoshop and create three
different comps using Photoshop to add all the value
and all the shading. So it's going to be a lot of fun. It's
very old-school. And if you're like me and you also love to
draw and you love to shade this is going to be a really great
and fun assignment for you. So let's get started. All right,
what I'm going to do first is bring in the drawing
that I already scanned here.
Okay, here you go. And this is -
you might recognize it as a character from Crouching Tiger,
Hidden Dragon, it's an Ang Lee film, came out a few years ago,
but has wonderful cinematography. I really
enjoyed the photography and his wonderful characters. So what
I'm going to do is take this drawing. I'm going to create
three different comps. Let's say I wanted to make a larger scale
painting or maybe a more finished drawing. What I want
to do first, of course, is is decide on the composition, don't under composition
specifically the value composition, you know, whether
we want mostly darks, lights, whatever, and Photoshop is the
perfect tool for doing that.
And
let's get started by first
blocking in some shapes. So this
is pretty big.
It's
a pretty high risk and 300 DPI. And of course set to tiff.
So what I'm gonna do is make a new file first and then just like we saw
in previous examples I'm going to make myself three different
thumbnails. So I'm going to first grab the drawing.
There's a couple ways to do this here. I'm just going to
just take the drawing, draw a marquee around it. So I don't
need all this white space. So that really doesn't matter the
stage and just kind of drag it in there. You can do that with
the marquee or you can just - if there's no marquee and you just
want to grab the drawing you get started. What I do is I
grab the layer itself and manually drag it into the new
document like that or you can do cut and paste, control A, control C,
that kind of thing but
I tend to just like to drag it in the document.
This looks pretty good. And it's pretty big. So I'm going
to shrink it down. What I want to do is have three - be able to
fit three of these on one page and one 8 by 10 sheet so that I
can print it out.
So what I can do is start big with one and then reduce it in
size.
So first, I'd like to make
a -
what do you call that?
A nice little frame. So I know what the composition will be
and
let's see. I'm going to drop the opacity. So what I want to
do - whoops.
This is too dark.
What I want to do is just
take this background and kind of give myself a nice crop.
That's the word I'm looking for. Like to get the right crop
that I want. And once I have the right crop, I can apply it
to the drawing.
And then could either make a mask around the drawing, which
I'm going to do here. I don't want to eliminate all that
other stuff.
So now
to make use of this drawing,
Meaning what we're going to do
is we're going to keep the drawing untouched as its own
layer, but we're going to add the tones underneath it on
separate layers. And the quickest way to do that is to
set it to multiply. So right now it's set to normal mode,
right? The drawing is on its own layer. It's surrounded by -
let me show you. See if I turn the canvas black you can see
the drawing is surrounded by white
we scanned on a sheet of paper. So
first I'm going to turn it to multiply.
So what multiply does is it eliminates the white of the
paper and all you can see is the dark, the darks. So that's a
great way if you scan a pencil drawing like this it's a great
way to be able to preserve your pencil drawing and use it as if
you were toning with markers. So this is very similar
approach to using marker or perhaps watercolor where you
would draw on your paper or your board and then
add the tones and the drawing is still preserved. So this
works a lot like that. So now it's set to multiply, I'm gonna
name name drawing.
Then I'm going to name this the flat or BG. It's called BG.
And I'm going to -
well first
let's make the BG about 50%.
Okay, so it's about a nice even mid-tone. So now what I'm going
to do is I'm going to add some tone to my character.
Well, let me make it 75 percent, it's a little easier for me to
see.
Okay, so now I'm going to
draw tones, add the tones, but first I need a mask, of course.
So
let's see if I can use the magic wand. What I really want
to do is draw a mask around her silhouette so I can use all the
clipping masks and things.
So, let's see
if magic is able to grab ahold.
Okay, in this case, it's not working. So it's no problem.
I'm going to have to draw a mask manually. It's no biggie.
We've done that many times.
So remember I typically like to draw a big crude mask like sort
of like this
and then
fine tune it as I go.
And here I'm holding alt.
Remember if you get
a little confused about this step. This was reviewed, you
can review the previous lessons on selections.
Such a powerful tool.
Basically
if you want to refine or modify your selection, you hold alt to
cut in like I'm doing,
you see the minus sign.
And if you wanted to add you hold shift and you see the plus
sign but in this case,
all I'm doing is
subtracting or cutting out, cutting into the selection
I already drew using the rectangular lasso tool.
This gives me a lot of control and you know personally I draw
with a lot of straights as you may be noticing, a lot
of straights here. That's just a personal taste and
aesthetics.
The sword has a very unique curve to it. I almost want to
use a
pen tool, the pen tool gives you the ability to create beautiful
long curves like this, kind of curves that are like a
nightmare to draw by hand.
Let's see this cut back in here.
And for this one, I'm not going to render per se
so not to worry too much about the pencil line, how deep I cut
into the pencil line.
So just going to be real basic. And for this one let's see if
I can
cut this out. So notice I want to cut this out quickly. So I
grab the magic wand and I hold alt, notice again it turns to minus
and then cut in, boom. So that's pretty good. That's a pretty
good cut. See that, cut that space out. Because I held the
minus key. That was the magic wand tool. So in this case it
worked because the silhouette was drawn fairly tight.
And that should do it I think for a nice little mask. And of
course I can modify the mask at any time. Now that I got a
mask I'm going to make a new layer. We'll call it flat.
And then boom. Okay, so we don't want it pure black, of
course.
So hue sat
and if you want precision I'm just going to go to 50. Just
nice and even, boom.
And the flat is bigger than my boundary. So what I'm going to
do here, actually, what I'm going to do
is also make a frame.
There's a couple ways to make a frame.
Yeah what I think I want to do, let's just lighten this little Let's just lighten this little
bit. I need to cut this and draw - I'm basically trying to draw a
black the border around the whole thing. So, let's see.
Let's take this. This is an object. Put this on top, I'm
going to drop the field. This is a vector object shape.
Remember if you drop the fill to zero, you can still have a
nice clean stroke in. There you go 24 pics, seems pretty
good. Let's try 30 pics, all that seems better. But you
know, it's a little too tight. So I got to expand it.
See?
Just want to make sure that
because I set the stroke to inner instead of outer because
I wanted that clean tight edge, remember if you set the stroke to
outer you'll get a curved edge. Okay, so now that's a pretty
nice frame.
I'm liking that but I want this
to be cut off. So what I'm going to do is I can either
apply a mask to all of this or what I can do is make a
folder. So I'm going to make a group, I'm selecting all,
command G. If you have a bunch of layers selected, it creates
a group and then I'm going to do is I'm just going to call it
layers because all of my artwork will be in this layer
in this folder.
And then I'm going to put a mask on this, boom. So now
everything in this folder will be within this mask. Within this
tight shape. So now I don't don't have to worry about going
outside. So for example, you can just you know, I can just
go like that right and it stays locked in my stroke or the
frame, that black border's at the top, going to call it
frame just so I know what it is.
Okay, so now I'm good to go. So that was the set up, you know,
this
I kind of went forward and backwards, but that's okay. I
mean there's five hundred ways to do the same thing. So
that's why I always kind of skip around and don't
always follow total linear logic, but essentially the
steps are all the same.
So the next stage is the shadow block in. So I'm going to get
myself a fairly nice dark mid-tone. And let's set this to
80.
Now I got to decide how much of her will be in dark shadow
because it's not - the lighting
wasn't ideal.
So I don't even know if this will be a good step to be
honest with you. Typically if I have a beautiful clean shadow,
I will almost always do this step. But for this one the
shadow wasn't that tight as you can see, it's kind of
all over the place. So
forgot to clip it there.
And actually the
you know, I'm going to call this layer darks.
These are my dark shadows.
Right now set to 80.
Eighty percent opacity. So it gives me a little bit of
softness, not too much.
And let's see here.
What I'm trying to do is get myself a nice
clean dark shadow shape.
And a little bit of subtle tones there.
So it's not the cleanest, most uniform, most contrasty shadow,
but this is fine
for what I have to do.
Okay.
Just adding tone where I feel that it needs it.
I'm using the same values, fairly dark value, but a soft
airbrush this time.
You can see how beautiful the multiply layer is working. The
drawing is showing through right now, it's beautiful.
So we're getting some of the value and tone from the drawing
already.
Okay so I'll call this darks
and this one I probably won't need to add variation or
anything. So I'm going to go ahead and mask it right there.
That way I don't need to clip it.
So with for the flats, I'm going to go ahead and mask it.
Well,
I'm going to give it some variation. That's what I meant
to say.
So go from bottom up because I imagine the light source is upper
left or straight up. I'm going to go from the bottom left
there.
And
let's see what else I can do. That was just a general pass,
looks really nice. And then I'm going to do a lighter pass
using the gradient tool
and I'm going to clip that as well. Let's see what happens if
I expand that a little bit because I want that feeling
that light's coming from above
and the bottom so really looks really nice so far. So I like
that so far. It's a little too contrasty. What I'm going to do
is mask out the areas that should be dark, like the
sockets. I guess a problem with that highlight. It's
washing out my lights a little too much, or my dark little too
much. I don't really want that.
Okay.
Okay, it's good. Drop it a little bit more. It's good.
It's perfect. Okay, I call it variation.
Let's see. What's next?
What I'd like to do is get a little gradation on this,
just on this outfit, so I'm going to mask it out.
Oops.
see that. Yeah, beautiful.
So a little bit darker there. I also want to do it here at the
arm. So I'm masking out this section because I don't want -
I don't want it to affect this section or really anything
else. That's why I'm going to use a mask because I like to
use the gradient tool. So you see that beautiful gradient
that happened there.
Should probably put another layer. Always try to put things on a
new layer. That way I can always adjust each operation,
fine tune it, and then if I'm happy with it can merge down.
One more pass right here. Maybe a couple more passes.
I just want to affect this
shirt thing, her sleeve there.
It's going
bottom up and inside out.
That one was a little too - whoops. Whoops.
Too aggressive up top.
Basically doing some really quick washes of tone. You may
notice that it feels like tone so now, I have my darks
and my mids, but no light. So first I'm going to put a light
here, but let me darken the background. So this is one of
my first
decisions and there's a bunch of ways to do this. I like
gradient tools so much. Let me just try that. Let me just
darken the background.
And then
but I'm going to clip it.
And then maybe add some texture at the bottom. Let's see what
that looks like.
I'm not quite sure how how light I want it to be.
And you know that you don't have to use a brush like that.
You could have just slapped on a gradient, it would work just as
well.
I want to see what it look like little bit of texture. That's
one of the things I could use this step for of course is to
figure out those a texture background work better than a
soft quiet background like that.
Not sure what's going to find out.
Let's try dissolve.
Kind of like that grainy look, that looks kind of cool. Let's see I was kind of cool. Let's see
we can blur it, filter blur.
Let's try motion blur.
Clip that and then we'll add a mask and
I'm just trying a bunch of different things right now.
So
it feels pretty good. Feels like a pretty good start.
Let me get it a little more. I'm still not quite happy with the value
there. Let me get a little bit more. Oops. I don't want -
let me just focus on the value for now.
All right, let's do that.
That's more of a chiaroscuro. I like that much better Carol. I like that much better
actually. Okay good. So let's settle on that as a background.
So now - well now you can see the mask.
Right here isn't that clean. Let me
clean that up.
This is - all this little noise is a little disturbing. So all I
have to do is tighten up the mask.
And that was - remember here we use the
wand tool, magic wand to quickly select this area.
But sometimes
the tools you still need to do some cleanup work.
That's okay. They they get us
almost the way almost there. That's what the tools and
shortcuts do. They kind of get you in the ballpark.
And then from there you can
take over and fine-tune it, refine it, polish it.
Okay, let's see. It looks pretty good.
Let's see if I can clean up the sword a little bit.
See, that's why I think I should have used a curve here.
The pixelated-ness is - it's all right.
And notice I'm using erase, so I have to be a little bit
careful versus
using a mask. I know I say
using a mask is a little bit more -
little bit safer for sure, but
I think it's more.,
just smarter way to work. I'm just being being a little lazy
here. Okay, so the mask is pretty tight.
Let me get some tone on her hair.
I'll call these darks.
Oh, no, these aren't darks. What are these,
are these darks too?
Okay, let me get that. Oops.
Too harsh.
I wanted to make sure I put that on a separate layer
right there. Just clean up that little bit of dark around her
hair. If I want to put a rim light there, of course, I can
do that later.
Okay.
Alright, so now I'm set up.
BG tone, okay. So now I'm set up to do the lights. I needed
some value in the background because right now it's
surrounded by fairly light value, 75 percent grey,
right? So the lights - I won't be able to judge them correctly
until they do this. So now I have a choice. Let's see.
Should I put the brightest bright on the sword? I believe
in the reference it's on the sword. This is not clean.
Or should I put the
brightest bright on the -
oh also guys, you might be noticing I rotate the canvas.
In this version pf Photoshop it's with the R key.
But you know, you can also just do your remember flip canvas
hotkeys.
They work - they work pretty well too. But the R gives you this
arbitrary rotation. So just click R to get out
of rotation mode hit escape.
And then back to normal.
Okay, so this part is a little tricky because - well, it's not
tricky. Everything you see me do we've already done but it's the
order that's tricky. Right now my mind is like well should I
do this or do that because the order kind of really doesn't
matter especially for busy doing a sketch thumbnail is
kind of what we're doing here. And you know, we're not doing
anything finish and rendering and also Photoshop there
literally is 50 ways - there's a probably a hundred different
ways we could have did what you just saw. So that's why it
may feel like I'm going oh skipping steps, which I am, but
don't worry so much about the order, just pay attention to the
tools, you know, which we've already covered, lassos, layering,
adjustments, gradations, clips, clipping mask, all the stuff
we've covered. I'm just using the basic tools, but just using the basic tools, but
you just see me do it in slightly
different sequences, that's a good word for it. So
now we're almost done with the the setup. What I'm doing here
is setting up so that we can quickly have the setup,
the layers, the masks,
ready to do quick and easy variations. Once I have this
set up, once I have
the layers set up the way that we need we can quickly make
boom boom boom, different versions. So
just be patient a little bit here and you know
with practice too you'll be able to come up with your own way.
Right now you're just watching me do it the way that I'm
comfortable with, comfortable with the way that I think is
the most efficient but the sequence is kind of this - kind
of jumbled. So don't worry about that. We're almost done
with the setup mode. Last thing I need is lights. All right,
let's set up the lights.
All right, let's set up the lights finally. So what I'm
going to do is - let me just try this real quick. Let me
just try this.
I'm going to make a layer. Oops.
Just going to copy
to make a layer, clip it, call it lights.
I'm going to start. I know it has an I. I know lights has
an I. I'm going to start just with the great - because I know
there's a highlight in her face. I know that much. So let's try
that.
And it looks pretty good. Let me just temperature - or not temperature,
brightness. I'm skipping ahead to the painting lesson. You'll
guys want to make sure you come back for the color lesson next
time.
And let's do a couple more.
I'm using all gradation tool because it's just such a
beautiful and soft way to work.
Because my brush work can be like 50/50. Sometimes it looks
okay. Sometimes it looks like total crap. So I really like
the gradient tool for this reason
and because you know
I have unlimited layers. I can make as many layers as I need
and crop and edit and do all this all this good stuff, which
I like to do.
So you saw three pieces there, the cheek, the nose, and the
forehead on the three different layers. Just going to merge
them. I'm pretty happy with what I got.
And it didn't preserve the thing. That's okay. Typically
can preserve the -
now I'm doing some manual brushing here.
Just want to give her some highlights here. Put the little highlight
on her shield there.
So I'm pretty sure I'm going to put the bright highlight
on this area, the sword blade.
Now I don't have to, just going to make a comp and test it.
That's the beauty of Photoshop.
I'm just testing a theory that the highlight, the brightest
spot on the sword would look pretty good.
Will look the best. I don't know.
You don't know till you try it out, test the theory.
That's what a thumbnail is. You're creating a theory that
oh, my picture will look better if I do X, Y, and Z.
So I'm going to do this in a couple layers. I know it's a
sloppy mask.
Do this in a couple of layers.
Actually, let me include the sword. I don't need to mask the
actual blade because it's already clipped.
I do need to mask where the blade intersects with her body,
overlaps her body like this area. I want that to be fairly
tight because what I'm going to do now will only affect the
blade itself. So I'm going to make a -
let's go
make a new layer.
Put this guy on it.
And this is the mask for the blade itself and then I'm going
to start with pure white and just going to do reflective
gradient and
it affected the mask. And what I'm going to do is draw a marquee
around this area because when you do reflective gradient,
it
needs to be clipped first.
Okay. There you go.
Reflective gradient.
You can change, you know, you can change the angle very
quickly just by rotating it. So that's one of the features I
love about gradation tool, you combine it with layers,
it's just so so powerful.
Okay. So this is like a general glow on the sword there, which
I'm loving right now. I'm loving it.
I wish.
Actually, I'm going to make a new mask because I didn't - it's not
masking correctly.
The effect I want isn't mask incorrectly. So now I just need
the mask of the sword itself and the handle there.
So again, you know, you're seeing me do the sequence kind
of jumbled here, but
the tools are all the same.
Okay. Now I got a nice tight mask. Is it a tight mask? No, not
really.
There we go.
Awesome. Okay. Okay. So now I go to really tight mask. I'm
going to delete this guy. Delete. You see how it went over
now? I'm going to call this sword.
All right, here we go.
I'll call this lights.
I'm very sorry. All right. Now
soon you will see why I'm going through this much trouble.
Once these layers are set up correctly, you'll see the
benefit of doing it this way. Actually, there's one more
thing I want to add there.
Which is right here. This one feels a little flat.
You say it transform the mask is well as, that's what you were seeing
there because they were linked. Now they're unlinked so I'm able now. They're unlinked some able
to transform the
layer by itself
one more time.
So whenever you see me make make a new move, I'm pretty
much always doing this creating a new layer and then using the
set of
options that I have to modify and fine-tune it.
Preserve. I'm going to delete where it goes inside
the -
where you erase.
Okay.
Decent brush size, okay.
I still don't like preserve, I still don't like - student like
this hand is looking -
need a little bit of light there, but not too much.
Just some more aggressive manual brushing.
Okay. Anyway, let's get back to the sword. So here's the sword.
I'm going to drop that, what I just did, because I want a
bright bright highlight right down the middle. So I'm going
to make a new layer, duplicate the mass by holding alt and
dragging
Now I'm going to make a marquee because I don't want
the gradient to spill all over the canvas which makes it hard
to rotate, makes it very hard to rotate. So now I'm just going
to slap it on there. It looks pretty good.
What I can even do is drag this layer above the drawing, see
what happens there? Now it's like - looks really
bright. I love that, we can do that one more time probably.
Should keep doing that. Probably draw another marquee. Let's try
that just for fun.
Let's see.
Because the blade handle will have its own -
so I'm going to make a folder.
I'm going to put the mask of the blade in the folder and
with inside that folder I'm going to put a layer,
empty layer, I'm going to put the mask that I just drew
so now I can affect only the part of the blade but the
folder of masks out the blade itself. So basically using two
masks at one.
And then I can do this. Yes, see that? It only affects that area
that I drew but it also stays locked into the blade,
sort of a double mass technique. Going to clean up coming. We're going to clean up
the edge. Of course it's way too funky and hard.
Just clean up the mask.
Again using
the option to clean up my work.
Then lower the opacity a little bit.
It feels okay.
I can move it, still active. It's still masked so I can kind of move
it around to see what might look best. I could rotate it.
See how it might look best.
I think that looks pretty good right there.
So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to merge all of this work
that I just did into this layer. Oops kind of wanted to
preserve the sort. There you go. I've merged the group. Then
I've hit merge down and it preserved the layer and then we preserve the layer and then we
do a little bit of subtle erasing right here.
Just on that part. Yeah.
Too subtle there.
Okay.
Okay. So now I got a nice comp.
Now I finally have a comp. Now
in this comp, my darks are pretty much around her. Her
dark accents. Mid-tones are her outfit, her skin. The lights are
some of the lights on her skin and also the brightest
highlight here is on the sword and also on the handle.
So it's like a two value system. I can even do this, one more
thing. Just for fun I have a brush it creates a
a bling effect. I like that.
That way, you know, okay there's the brightest There's the brightest
highlight.
Okay.
Let's drop the opacity a little bit.
Okay,
so I like that comp. I'm going to call this comp one. All right.
I'm going to save this as
comps.
Okay. So now let's try a couple different versions.
Let's try a couple different versions. What if the one
obvious example is what if I
want the brightest highlight on her. Let's try that.
Very easy, so I'm going to duplicate my work.
Call this comp number two, and I'm going to move comp number
one above and move comp number two, just drag it and slide it
down - oh, I didn't copy the layer or the mask.
I forgot to put the frames.
Oops. I forgot to include the frame. So this is the layers.
This is the frame. I need them both. I'm going to put the
frame and the layers folder, select them both, command G, call
up a new folder. So call this comp one is now inside the
folder. I have the frame and all the layers with the mask
that keeps it nice and tight. Okay, so now I can duplicate
this, call this comp two, I'm going to change the order, move
it down because this one will go below it. I don't have to do
that. I just know one is at the top, two is on the bottom.
There'll be a third one which we'll have to adjust the size in
a minute. So
now we got all the layers that we need. So let's say I don't
like that sparkle.
I don't like all that sword highlight,
all that stuff.
I like the highlights. What if I want to put the brightest
highlight on her face. Let's say I keep the sword
sword is toned down, right? And now I want the brightest
highlight on her face and I'm going to put that above the
drawing actually.
So now I'm going to use it all.
Pure Photoshop
drawing toning here. I'm not using any tools, just using the
pen.
And just going to add the highlights where I think they
belong.
A little bit of highlight on that -
her shirt there.
Little bit more highlight on the top plane of that - her
costume there.
So that looks pretty good. And then what I'm going to do is
I'm going to intentionally brighten her.
So, let's see. I'm just going to make her brighter. I'm
pretty much gonna make
the world brighter too. See what -
if I just. I like that. I just lowered the opacity really of
that. You see how powerful
the layering system, no, you're starting to see oh, that's why
he did all that damn work.
Okay. So now I can do this. Let me
change the brightness.
Remember all this tonal work we did right here in the
beginning?
I can either drop the opacity or I can do a combination of
both lightening it.
Just want to see what it looks like if she's brighter.
Gonna kind of erase this out.
So extra bit of darkness that I did there. So now she's a
little bit brighter, little bit brighter all over.
A lot of the attention is on her face now
because the brightest highlight's there and you may
want that, you may not.
Little bit of texture.
This is kind of cool, now it's like kind of like hatching.
This is exactly what I would do in paper.
Just adding few more highlights down here just to see what it
looked like and of course I can do that because it's a comp. I
think that's starting to look pretty nice actually. Wow,
I don't know what you guys think at home, comparing these
two looking like the bottom of looks pretty good, huh?
Okay,
so that's it. That's it. That's my third cup. I wanted
to test two things. If the highlight looked better on her
than on the sword and if the background should be lighter,
her outfit should be lighter. That looks pretty good. Let's try
one more comp. I don't think I need that anymore.
I don't need that anymore.
Call this highlights.
And it's above the drawings. I don't care if it goes outside
the borders of the mask.
Yeah, it looks pretty good.
Okay. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to make - I'm going
to copy this one again. Just click, hold, and drag. Call it
comp
three.
And let's see should we go
down or to the right? Let's go to the right. That way you guys
can see I'm just going to expand my canvas
and
I use the crop tool. Sorry, you may not have seen that. That's really
best one way to expand the canvas. Let me undo that. I just
take the crop tool, shortcut is C, select the whole canvas and
then drag it. You can drag it. You can crop it by going
smaller, of course, but you can also drag it to go bigger. So
I'm just going to drag it to about double the size. Remember
we also can do that with canvas size.
Now we need to correct the gap, this black space. So I just
selected the tone that I put there in this case so
now I got a bigger canvas and now I'm just going
to drag - whoop - comp number three to the right. So now we
can see
actually making four comps now.
Okay. So what's one more combination we can try?
What if we make her -
let's make her super -
let's make her super dark.
This is kind of like a low-key, high-key, mid-key. We can make a
flatter one.
Yeah, I'm not quite sure what to do here, what kind of
combination.
Let's try - let's try
a different background idea.
Let's try a different background. Let's just try that because we
can. So we got my layers, take the background tone,
and
what I'm going to do first is
kind of like this darkness to it. Let's just see what it
looks like if we add texture and let's try that.
Texture and
put that on its own layer.
All of these custom brushes over just quick ways to make
texture.
Okay.
Okay, BG texture.
Let's see. It looks nice, it's really dark actually.
Let me try this. I like the texture so I'm just going to
see - put on a hue sat see if it looks good when it's - oh, it, does
look pretty good when it's darker. I like that.
I like that. So I'm just going to go ahead and
put that together. Just merge it down with the work
that I had and then going to try one more thing. I want the
beam of light to expand kind of passed her a little bit.
So I'm going to make a
circular gradient with a dissolve change it to like pure
bright white and we know that's too bright, doesn't really
matter.
And it's totally - because it's on its own layer can change
shape as much as I want. Now I'm going to do a filter.
Actually let me cut into a little bit here.
By cut into it I mean, let me see if I can erase
out of it and randomize it a little bit. So I'm going to
apply a filter and see what that does.
So filter, blur, motion blur, and they would all do cool
interesting things.
Yeah, this might not be the right texture for this.
It's worth it. It's worth a try.
I kind of like that. It's little bit peeking behind
her. So let's leave it at that for now. Let's just leave it at
that for now.
It's now it's too dark or it's too bright.
Okay, that's better. That's better. Just a little too dark -
or too bright. Excuse me.
Okay, so textured background, right away I don't like it. Doesn't
look as good as this one. So, let me make it a little bit
more subtle.
Okay, that's okay. Still not happy with it. But let's move
on here.
What other variations can I try? Let's see.
This looks okay with a really dark background.
Let's see if -
let's see if we can make our lower forms a little bit
brighter. So let's add some more light to these lower
forms.
Let's see this highlight. Let's keep that.
Okay,
so I'm going to make a layer right above lights. And let's just -
oops. Let's just start to
see what we can get here. What I want to see if these if it -
if it looks good to bring out these forms, meaning make them
catch some light in here is what I'm doing here.
Okay.
Right away I'm not liking this as much
as the previous one.
Not just the the brushwork looks a little sloppy, but it's
just compositionally it's not as strong.
That nice break contrast
that nice contrast between the dark -
darks and lights up top.
It has a nice feeling of fall off.
Looks okay. It's okay.
Gradient little bit here.
Looks okay.
Now I'm not liking the background. Let's keep
things simple here when. What I'm going to do is make a plain
old dark background. Just whoop.
And
I'm going to give this one a little bit of noise.
Just going to make a new layer and this is pure black here.
This little bit of texture noise.
That way it's not super flat and dark.
Let's drop the opacity there, make it more subtle.
Now I have some
texture. Let me
make some -
there you go.
Just want that texture to be really subtle. Okay, and now I'm going to do a -
let's try this.
Let's try this.
I'm going to make it a nice hot spot. Whoa, that looks pretty
good. It's really dramatic, like a poster almost, like a movie
poster. I like that.
That was just kind of an accident. I was hoping for the
splatter brush actually.
This brush it's kind of randomy and organic, which is good and mean organic, which is good and
bad. It's bad. It's good because it is random and you
have very little control over it.
When you touch it down, kind of looks different.
I kind of like that, just make it subtle. Yes. I'm liking
this. I'm glad I tried it, you see me struggle through it.
Well, I like that. So in this case, yeah, we have a dark
background with this cool like mystical effect on her.
What I can even do is try - let's try this. I'm going to take her Try this. I'm going to take her
lights
and
let's see what happens - I'm gonna duplicate this,
the lights, in case I don't like what I'm about to do. I can
bring back the original.
So turn down the lights here
on her face
even more, kind of like that. So what I'm trying to do is
get -
see if I can get a hard hard highlight on her
and
have this one go above the pencil line that way so it's
really really bright. And now there's like a nice specular
highlight, specular just means it's
more reflective. So let's say her skin
is little bit oily
or has moisture on. It's wet, things become much more
reflective.
So don't worry about
what it's called. Just know that hey you're making a
comp
and you got to make your comp look good so sometimes you good so sometimes you
highlights have to go really hard.
And I'm going to try a different tool, I'm going to use a
gradient tool.
I like that.
All right so now she has some specular highlights. A little
bit different than down here.
I kind of like that. Let me add some more spec highlights.
This makes it feel like very movie poster-y which I love. I'm
loving that look.
You know what I mean, it's very dramatic, I'm loving it.
And then one last thing I want to try is texture, is texture.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a mask. I'm going
to put this above -
these are the lights.
Going to merge my work here.
Looks pretty good actually.
Happy accident. Preserve.
I basically kept my original lights. Oh no. No, here it is.
Okay.
I was able to combine it. Okay. So the last thing I'm
going to do is add a little bit of texture. So I'm going to
take a layer put a mask on it because I don't want it to go outside
of her boundary. And I'm going to - I got this little polkadot
brush. You can also do this with dissolve and just going to
add a little bit of texture,
just to see if it looks good. It may not look good. Maybe I
want her to be nice and smooth and polished looking.
This adds a lot of grit and you got to be careful, of course on the
face because it feels like razor stubble. I'm just going
to undo that, do not want to add razor stubble to a
female especially lead character like this.
Actually I'm liking this texture. Let me see if I put it
above drawing what happens.
Right now it's -
it was below the lights that's why I wasn't seeing it that well.
And if some of you are fans of like
Drew Struzan,
he is a famous poster artist,
he does this sort of thing with
his movie posters but
uses acrylic paint, of course, he's old school like me.
All right, so that looks pretty good. That's all I'm going to -
I'm going to put an end to it here. That's my third comp.
And let me just get them all in order.
And I'm going to - now I'm going to crop, I just draw a marquee.
And
keyboard shortcut for cut or crop and boom.
We started with this one, this one took quite a while because
we had to do all this set up. We had this set up.
Let's put this down here. Instead of all the layers make sure set of all the layers make sure
the frame was working, then once we had the setup remember how
easy this one came and then this one came, was a little bit
tricky, but we basically had everything we needed to make
quick quick instant variations. So that's pretty
cool. Alright, so you got to see me do it. I know kind of
went a little all over the place. So again, if you get
confused or you get lost just just review and all of the
stuff, you know, we've covered already
you can review the previous sections because nothing I did
was new or different from what we covered, it was just done in
different sequence. So the sequence really doesn't
matter. I mean, it kind of matters depends on your style
and your taste and what you're after but important thing is
the tools. So now, you know how you can make comps quickly,
hand-drawn. You can scan your own drawing and then now you
know how to set up your layers and all your clipping masks and
things to make quick variations. Boom. Boom. Boom.
Boom. Boom. Really fast, really easy, you know, and you know
all this stuff is exactly like how you would do it in
traditional. I would have done this with marker and pen and
pencil as well. But you know in Photoshop it's so fast and
so easy we can make - we make three more, we can make 30 more
no problem. So hope you had fun. Remember to review,
remember to practice. This is a lot of stuff we covered but
once you get familiar with it, it'll seem like a nice
breezy walk in the park. So until next time, take
care.